28 April 2020

Trump, Coronavirus, Disinfectants


OK, let's put this one to bed quickly... the challenge with viruses is not destroying them; that is easy.  It's how to target them within an infected host, without damaging the host.

I can understand the frustration that causes one to wish it were possible to call in an air-strike, but that only works if the enemy and your friends are not mixed.  So, general biocidal strategies are great outside the body, but useless within... unless they can be focused on the target.  That's ID-specific policing and sniping, not a carpet-bombing airstrike!

Internal intelligence


Humans have two intelligent systems, only one of which we experience as our consciousness; the one that stems from the animal strategy of physically moving around.

The other intelligence defends the self internally, and has deeper roots than multicellular animals.  This is the immune system, the highest level of which crafts particular-shaped proteins to bind specifically to stuff that isn't white-listed as part of the body's own organic chemicals.  It is this that is expected to give post-infection immunity, at least until the virus mutates beyond recognition (as RNS viruses like Influenza and Coronavirus tend to do), and this is is the basis for vaccination as a pre-infection defense.

Why not antmicrobial drugs?

 

Larger infective agents such as bacteria are easy to attack using simpler chemistry, because their core biological processes involve proteins sufficiently different to our own, so they can be specifically targeted without harming the host.

Viruses are different, because they are pure genetic information that use the host cell processes to reproduce.  So, all those biological processes you can uniquely attack in bacteria, are your own processes when it comes to how a virus "lives".

Viruses coat their genetic material in protein(s) coded within its genetic material.  This coating may both hide the genetic material from the host immune system, and bind the virus to the targeted cells of the host.  Aside from our internal immune systems figuring out how to target this protein and/or genetic material within, cruder chemistry could find ways to disrupt the process whereby the virus binds to host cells, and target that as a means of treatment.

I'm starting to write more about biology here, starting with how it works, and how the biosphere compares with the infosphere, etc.

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