Posted on 06/21/2021 1:21:45 AM PDT by DallasBiff
Ok, I know this a vanity, but what is the difference between a bacterium(plague) which can be treated with antibiotics, and a virus(covid, flu) has to be eradicated by a vaccine?
VD killed King Henry VIII, not the plague, so as I was taught.
Bacteria are small, living, single-cell organisms. Your body is actually full of bacteria all the time. Most of them are good and helpful. For example, in your gut, bacteria help break down food your body can’t otherwise digest, unlocking the nutrients and enabling your body to use them. In exchange, those bacteria get the relatively safe and comfortable environment of your gut to live in, complete with meals delivered regularly. Some bacteria are harmful. Usually they consume resources to grow and multiply, and sometimes they emit toxic byproducts that damage your tissues. Antibiotics help to disrupt their life processes, killing them or severely harming them.
Viruses are not living things as they can’t reproduce on their own. Rather, they’re just bits of genetic code wrapped inside an envelope of lipids (fat), protein, etc. Viruses enter living cells and use the machinery inside the cell to build copies of themselves. They do so until the cell is used up and dead, producing millions of copies of themselves. Those copies then erupt from the dead cell into the surrounding tissue to repeat the process in other cells. Antiviral medications exist for many viruses and they typically work by either blocking the virus from entering cells or by blocking that replication process.
Vaccines work by showing your body a critical part of something harmful (called an “antigen”) in a form that isn’t dangerous. That could be a bacterium (e.g. pneumonia), a virus (e.g. smallpox), a parasite (e.g. malaria), or a toxin (e.g. tetanus). Antigens are normally collected by dendritic cells during an infection when the nonspecific immune cells (primarily macrophages and neutrophils) signal they need help. The dendritic cells collect samples of the invader’s antigens and take them to lymph nodes to specific defenses (mainly from T cell and B cell lymphocytes) can be activated to overwhelm the infection. Unfortunately, this takes time to happen. If we show the dendritic cells the antigens ahead of time with a vaccine, those T cell and B cell lymphocyes get prepared ahead of time and are ready to go should the actual invader appear in the body.
VD refers to any sexually transmitted disease. Some are bacterial, some are viral.
You state "Viruses are not living things as they can’t reproduce on their own. Rather, they’re just bits of genetic code wrapped inside an envelope of lipids (fat), protein, etc." Do I understand your explanation than that virus' are not of nature but man-made?
You nailed that one to the wall. In a nutshell: one is living, one is not. Been there.
No. Viruses are natural but they can’t reproduce on their own. They rely on the host cells they are in to reproduce. Bacteria can reproduce on their own.
Of course that isn’t implied. Viruses have been around long before the advent of modern bioengineering technology.
Outstanding explanation. Everyone above age of ten must be forced to memorize it.
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If you’ve already had the virus, then you should be immune to it in the future. Therefore, millions of Americans can skip getting the Emergency Use Authorization Covid vaccine.
We can kill a bacterium with antibiotics,
True, to a degree... No one knows how long this natural immunity lasts.
Viruses are not little vegetables but are tiny bitches that carry the dna or rna that codes for things like other viruses. When those guys overgrow bad things can happen. Drugs for bacteria do not work on viruses and vice versa.
There are also vaccines for contagious bacterial plagues.
No, nature puts things together via chemistry. In the case of a virus, this either happened by an additive process (i.e. starting with a strand of genetic material and st some point a protein coat was added to it) or a reductive process (i.e. a larger structure lost bits and pieces until all that was left was this protein coat and genetic material). There are even stranger things which still work. Viroids are like a virus, but without even the protein coat. Prions are just a protein. Both are still infectious and can cause major issues. Both are observed all the time in nature.
Viruses have been around for a long, long time. Smallpox had been around for about 3,500 years before it was eradicated from the world. Just because it can't reproduce on its own doesn't mean it can't still come about without man's influence. It simply takes the right environment for the chemistry to take over. A basic cell membrane (phospholipid bilayer) will form spontaneously given the right environment.
Thank you for your detailed and understandable explanation.
That’s the most deadly thing on Earth. It’s killed more living things than anything else in history by many orders of magnitude. There’s a great video on them here: https://kurzgesagt.org/portfolio/the-bacteriophage/
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