Virus: the organism that always brings polemics.

  While doing this post I started to create the first banner in Canva, but I could only find figures associated with COVID-19 figure, so here is the first polemic, do you think that all the viruses have this form? The answer is no of course. So it is crazy nowadays when we look at the COVID-19 representation we associate with a general viral representation. An in reality the spherical part of the virus is the viral envelope which is not present in all Viruses, it is a characteristic of the family Coronaviridae including the COVID-19 virus, not only that. Viruses generally have a capsid formed by proteins; inside it, you can find their genetic material. For me, the first image association of a virus remembers some school images where I first learned about them and also about bacteriophages:

pixabay picture of a bacteriophage

  For those who don't know them, they are the most abundant virus in our world, and they infect ... bacteria. Another problem that I brought in my opening is the word "bugs". This word can be used for insects or other arthropods in addition. But people tend to get sick and say " I got a bug", so if you think clearly, is the person full of spiders? full of flies? or full of viruses? However, sometimes the person is coughing due to an allergy to pollen! So this person is not even being infected or infested by anything!

The great conflict of life! What is life, are viruses alive?

  For sure this polemic for professionals and non-professionals that love to talk about virus, what is the definition of life? and how viruses are in it. There is still no standard agreement for that, it is something that I first heard in my school days and I still hear from it. Viruses don't have cells like any other organisms, however, they can multiply your genetic material (which it can be DNA or RNA, double or single-stranded, with such a great variability of it!). They aren't derived from the primordial cells from the cell theory, however, they still can have some type of hereditary changes in their genetic material like any good old living organisms. So even being a parasitic organism that still needs to invade to multiply, it has some properties of a living being. There is a well-written article here about it in the microbiology society in here . But I can say that they exist and there are proofs around there about them, being pathogenic to humans or not, that sounds silly to say, but once I read around people saying that they were invented by politics or whatever.

We use antibiotics for infections, why they don't bring a cure for popular diseases like AIDS, COVID, influenza, and hepatitis?

  antibiotics work very well to fight bacteria, which despite being cellular organisms, their structure and metabolism differ a lot from eukaryotic cell structure, like mammals, with us included. People start to bring up conspiracy theories to justify the absence of chemical treatment for viruses, but they forget that on the other hand, in the other hand after bacteria organisms, we have protists that also we have another big problem to develop a very effective treatment that doesn't bring harsh consequences for us. Because like us, protists have eukaryotic cells and their metabolism is pretty similar to our cells, most of the things that affect them, also affect us! So we have that amoeba found in lakes that goes directly to our brain and we can't do anything to fight it, or even chronic diseases caused byTrypanosomatidaes or Leishmaniosis. Coming back to viruses, the problem is that all of their metabolism is host-dependent, so they use our machinery for everything! So the perfect drug is to somehow block mechanisms from us that help them multiply, but that will probably kill us too. Because of this problem, we are still very far from the perfect anti-virals that could at least eradicate viruses from an infected person. So for now what is the best medicine for viruses? Our immune system, and yes how can we help it? With vaccines. So when people develop new technologies for vaccines they aren't trying to control you or sterilize you. It is a good attempt to improve your chances of fighting a foreign body infecting you. But I got all the recommended shots and I still got the flu or covid or whatever! That's normal, raising the chances it is not a metal shield that can't brake, even a condom doesn't guarantee you 100% the chance of not having a baby.

Conclusion

  Viruses are polemic in their own structure and survival methods, associating outbreaks to politicians figures of course creates more polemics in top of that, people start to associate a pro or anti posture against an outbreak so as fast as possible people start saying that "Truedau and the liberals in Canada or the Democrats in the US are the cause of the problem" or that virus doesn't exist and aren't real. But they are there before our lives and they will be there after for sure, infecting plants, bacteria or even the alien race that will be here instead of us.