I was enjoying some wine with friends (albeit at a safe distance) when it became clear they really didn’t get the whole virus infection/immune response thing.   And, I fear some of you may not quite remember (or ever learned about) immune responses.  So, let’s do a quick lesson/review.

Viruses are a funny lot.  When we study a cell- human, animal, plant, bacteria, yeasts or fungi- we notice a great many similarities (and differences).  Almost every cell has a nucleus, cytoplasm, and a cell membrane.  Animal and human cells lack cell walls; plants, bacteria, yeast, and fungi have a cell wall around the cell membrane.

More importantly, these cells are alive or dead.  Ok- some can be ‘dormant’- like bacteria that form spores.  But, we can kill these cells with chemicals, heat, ultraviolet light, and the like.

Now, viruses are a whole ‘nuther thing. Viruses have a protein sheath protecting either DNA or RNA.  These capsules are not living or dead, per se.  A virus much attach itself to a living cell (human, animal, bacteria) and once it does, the infected cell becomes the perfect slave- or is that zombie? The infected cell follows the instructions of the virus RNA or DNA explicitly.  The virus forces the cell to produce copious replicants of itself- complete with the protein sheath that are expelled from the infected cell.    So, if we can kill the virus, it may still have released dozens of other viruses that can infect other cells.  If we destroy the cell that is growing the virus before the virus clones are complete, then we diminish the chance for further infection.

Given that- what about the SARS-CoV-2 virus?  This virus is called a coronavirus- it has a spike (a corona) that attaches to ACE-2 sites in our cells.  It turns out that the protein sheath  has an M protein.   Our body reacts to those two stimuli differently.  In particular, it seems that response to the M protein triggers a whole different immune response- one that can be an overresponse.  (We’ll talk about this tomorrow.)

So, I said we can kill living cells with chemicals, heat, ultraviolet light, etc.  Let’s consider them- in reverse order.

Depending upon how strong the cell’s defense are (cell wall or not, etc.), ultraviolet light (UV) is an effective killing agent.  The problem is that if one doesn’t provide a sufficient dose of ultraviolet light, it is just as likely that the cell’s DNA will mutate- and you will have created a living organism that is far more resistant to UV light.  (Way back when, we used to use low levels of ultraviolet light to deliberately mutate bacteria so we could culture the ones with the attributes we wanted.  [Attributes as to what sort of nutrients (food) upon which we wanted them to feast- things like ammonia, phenolics, and other recalcitrant chemicals.]

Now, the dosage for UV light is a product of the intensity of irradiation and time- the light intensity is measured in power/area [typically microwatts/cm²], the time in seconds.  So, the dosage to kill various living things is rated in microwatt-seconds/cm².  And, despite some (idiotic) ideas promoted by TheDonald, we cannot use UV light in or on our bodies to kill microbes.  (OK- we can use it on the exterior of our bodies- but our skin [integument] cells are negatively impacted.)

Chemicals are effective killing agents. But, you knew that.  Because when I went to the store months ago, there was no Clorox (bleach) or Lysol to be found on any of the shelves.

Heat is the process by which we kill unwanted microbes (or even those that don’t harm us, but cause the food to go bad) in our foods.  Typically, this process is used for canned and bottled goods.

The one method many of have relied upon to deal with infections in our bodies has been antibiotics.  An antibiotic is a chemical compound that reliably stops the growth of bacteria- usually by interfering with the cell wall or nuclear functionality of the infecting cells.  One of the problems is that we’ve OVERprescribed these compounds- you do realize that using antibiotics for colds (which is a viral infection) is absolutely useless.  Feeding antibiotics to animals so they will grow faster means that bacteria learn how to cope with antibiotics- so that when we want to kill them, the drugs are no longer able to do so.

Now that we have this brief introduction/review completed, we’ll talk about our native body defenses tomorrow.  Which can be augmented by various things (vaccines, antibodies, etc.)