Just a little background info from the micribiology class. Viruses do not belong to any Kingdom. They are not considered "alive" nor "nonliving"(like a chemical or an element).They are made up of the same basic molecules that are shared by all living things on this planet. But they do lack certain abilities that any living organism has. The reason why they are not considered alive is because they don't eat, drink, breathe, excrete or any other activity that falls under even basic metabolism. Only things they have is 1 or 2 outer shells, DNA-like material inside and hook-and-inject mechanism. Once inside a living organism, they attach to a living cell(sometimes a certain type only, like noze/throat or liver), and inject their DNA-like material inside. That is the only activity they perform of any kind, ever. Thats their "life" cycle. The reason why they are not considered"non-living" is because once the DNA is inside a living cell, the cell recognizes it as its own and adapts its life cycle to what the virus DNA tells it to do. It tells the cell to make more viruses. Certain strains can also cause the cell to become cancerous. So to continue, the cell creates many pieces of viral DNA-like stuff, viral outer shells, and the "hook+inject" mechanisms then assembles them together until the point that there is no more space inside. Cell bursts open, and new generation of viruses is released into the host. After bursting open the cell dies. This is the reason why medication cannot kill them directly- because the only time they are "alive" is when they take over our own cells. And we can't kill our own cells. The few medications that we have developed for certain viruses are either vaccines which you have to get b4 infection for them to be useful, or medications that prevent the viruses from attaching and injecting. Problem with those is that they are only effective in the very beginning of an infection and once the virus had a chance to multiply in the body they lose their effectiveness. Good news is that our bodies have been fighting viruses forever. So we got d-fence. And it takes us a while (at least a few days for most viruses)to catch up and eventually produce enough "defenders" for the viruses to get outnumbered and kicked out of the body. Problem is, there are some viruses that are smart. Once injected into the cell their DNA tells the cell nothing at first. So the infected cells keep dividing and doing their normal functions like nothing happened. This can last years and depending on the virus sometimes nothing will happen at all. Usually not tho, because they do need to infect new hosts, so the DNA will at some point activate and tell the cell to stop everything and start producing only virus spare parts to assemble and release.
Now , something like AIDS does all of the above and more. Its smart, where it wount activate right away and the type of cells it attaches to are our "defender" cells. So not only the body can't fight the AIdS off but it also becomes at some point unable to defend itself against most other diseases.Alrite, back to swine flu. So you can't get swine flu from eating meat because its only travels by air. So lets eat more meat and feel like it has nothing to do with it and you are not at a greater rick, right? Well wrong , because you and every1 else that eats meat or pork are putting the whole humanity at risk because huge farms is where this stuff comes from, along with other neat diseases that you can get from eating meat. So eat less meat.
4/29/2009 1:43 PM
