Viruses Are Not Bacteria
They’re viruses! It’s a completely different thing
Between 1918 and 1920, while the world of reeling from the devastation of the first World War, humanity was attacked by another enemy. An ancient enemy identified as a “filter passer.” Meaning it passed through a Chamberlain Filter, which was known to filter out all known bacteria.
What exactly was causing this illness was not known. Scientists at the time knew that there were some infectious agents that could spread and could not be identified as bacteria, but they had never seen something like this. Tens of millions died during the pandemic, most of them young. Humanity dove into the scientific world for answers. Scientists quickly identified that it was spread through respiration. The newly invented facemasks were recommended for everyone to try to halt the disease.
But Influenza raged on for two years and through 3 waves, then seemed to vanish just as quickly as it came. Of course, it never actually left and is still with us today.
Scientists the world over searched desperately for what was caused the pandemic, but it would not be until 1931 with the work of Dr. Richard Shope that H1N1 would be identified.
To understand the problem with identifying these things, you need to understand the scope in size we’re talking about.
The size is tiny, beyond microscopic. For example, the diameter of a single human hair is 100x the size of bacteria (like Escherichia coli).
On top of that, Viruses do not reproduce normally. They are parasites, in a fashion. They lack the mechanisms of a normal cell that would allow it to replicate. That means it must penetrate a living cell, hijack its internal mechanisms and get the cell to make more viruses.
It’s this odd way of replicating that always gives scientists pause when describing viruses as living or not.
It’s also why antibiotics do not work on viral infections.
Previously I wrote about how antibiotics target specific mechanisms that bacteria have and your cells do not have.
Well, it turns out that viruses also do not have those mechanisms and cannot be stopped in the same way. That’s why your doctor will likely not give you antibiotics for a sore throat. Statistically, viruses are the most common cause of upper respiratory tract infections with bacterial infections only causing 15% of infections.
So what can we do about viruses? The most important is vaccines! Next article I’m going to go over vaccines, how they work and why you really should be vaccinated.
This is the fifth entry of a series of articles about infections. In the next one we will talk about vaccines, their use through history, and how they’re much older than you might think!
