Question

Why is it viral diseases are more difficult to treat compared to bacterial diseases

Answer 1

Ans. The treatment of viral infections is more challenging when compared to bacterial diseases and this is primarily because viruses are relatively very small in size and reproduce inside the cell for its survival.When a cell is infected by a virus, it destroys the cell and simultaneously releases new virus and this continues very rapidly,making it tough to be treated with usual medicines which are otherwise effective for bacterial diseases.Apart from this,there are various other reasons like:

1. Virus survive and reproduce only inside the cells which makes it difficult for the antibodies to reach them and attack them.
2. In case of viral infections, treatment with antibiotics is useless and won't help because viruses use their host cells itself to peform their activities.In order to overcome this antiviral drugs are being discovered which works by interfering with viral enzymes.But these drugs are effective only against a few types of viral diseases and still research is going on for producing more such drugs.Moreover,when compared to antibiotics, antiviral drugs have severe side effects too.
3. Viruses being obligatory parasites,uses the host cells itself to reproduce.Thus,a chemical or durg that kills them will eventually kill the host cells too.Thus it is very challenging to discover drugs that inhibits the growth of virus and at the same time do not affect the host cells.
4. Carrying out experiments on viruses in the lab is also challenging because they survive and reproduce inside the host cells.This makes the research process slow and thus very few drugs are found and tested for its effectiveness when compared to anitbiotics which effectively treats bacterial infections,because bacteria reproduce outside the host cells and thus it is easier to target them.Unlike antiviral drugs that targets only a few viruses, a single antibiotic can target many bacteria.