Question

What kills viruses in the human body?

Answer 1

A virus is a microscopic infectious agent that replicates only within an organism's living cells. Viruses infect all living things, including bacteria and archaea, from animals and plants to microorganisms.

Complete answer:
More than 9,000 virus species have been described in detail of the millions of types of viruses in the environment since Dmitri Ivanovsky's 1892 article describing a non-bacterial pathogen infecting tobacco plants and Martinus Beijerinck's discovery of the tobacco mosaic virus in 1898. Viruses are the most common type of biological entity and can be found in almost every ecosystem on the planet. Virology is a subspecialty of microbiology that studies viruses.

The total collection of viruses in and on the human body is known as the human virome. Viruses can infect both human cells and other microbes such as bacteria in the human body (as with bacteriophages). Some viruses cause illness, while others go unnoticed. As proviruses or endogenous viral elements, certain viruses are also integrated into the human genome.

Viruses evolve quickly, so the human virome is constantly changing. Every human being has a distinct virome with a distinct species balance. Pre-existing immunity and both viral and human genetics affect an individual's susceptibility to any disease that may be caused by those viruses, as well as their lifestyle, age, geographic location, and even the season of the year.

The cytotoxic T-cell, a type of immune cell that hunts down and kills virus-infected cells, is a specialized cell of the immune system. However, this is a very complicated topic with numerous other factors at play.

Note: In animals, viral infections trigger an immune response that typically eliminates the infecting virus. Vaccines, which confer an artificially acquired immunity to a specific viral infection, can also produce immune responses. Some viruses, such as those that cause AIDS, HPV infection, and viral hepatitis, are able to evade these immune responses and cause chronic infections. Antiviral drugs have been developed in a variety of classes.