3 ms·
Viruses are weird. I want cures to these diseases as much as the next person; but a "broad anti-viral"? What about the good viruses?
by sukuriant 14y ago
Viruses are weird. I want cures to these diseases as much as the next person; but a "broad anti-viral"? What about the good viruses?
- kornork 14y agoI stopped reading when the author said there weren't good viruses so it should be ok to indiscriminately kill them.
- sliverstorm 14y agoYeah! What about the rights of viruses! PeTA will be all over this! Hah, but seriously, we aren't even sure if viruses should be considered "alive" yet. On a scale of marble statue to flesh-and-blood human, viruses are automaton.
- podperson 14y agoRead TFA which addresses this point in several respects. From my skimming of the article: 1. Viruses are believed to have had a beneficial effect (or an effect of some kind) on human evolution. 2. Viruses are mainly bacteriophages and it's possible that "good" viruses keep some bacterial populations in check, but no studies have thus far found this in human beings, although it appears to be true of seawater. 3. The antiviral in question is broken up by the body in a few days, so any increase in bacterial populations that might result from the antiviral would probably be short-lived.
- sukuriant 14y agoAgreed. So, it will be interesting to see if the generic anti-viral negatively effects us as a species; and what we'll do about it.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- DenisM 14y agoThe article addresses that - while there are good bacteria, there aren't any known good viruses (sp?).
- sliverstorm 14y agoWell, unlike bacteria, to my understanding there's only a couple varieties of operational mechanisms for viruses (e.g. RNA virus vs. DNA virus). They bind to a variety of receptors and all that, but it seems like there is far more variety in bacteria, so it isn't surprising an effective anti-viral would be fairly broad in nature. disclaimer: not a microbiologist.
- AnthonyMouse 14y ago>What about the good viruses? I think the idea is that you only take this when you have a serious "bad" virus, in which case you don't care. If you have a sufficiently bad viral infection, "but it kills the good viruses" is kind of irrelevant when the alternative is being dead. People always like to talk about the cure for the common cold, and maybe this is it if the consequences of killing good viruses are sufficiently minor, but what this really seems to be is a cure for the likes of HIV.