Viral Diseases in Humans

Viral Diseases in Humans

Viruses also cause a wide range of diseases in humans, and the way medicine deals with viral disease is fundamentally different from the way it deals with bacterial disease, because a virus depends entirely on a host cell's own machinery to multiply and has no independent metabolism of its own for a drug to target. Antibiotics, which work by disrupting bacterial cell structures or bacterial metabolic processes, are therefore not effective against viruses. Because direct treatment of an established viral infection is often difficult, the public-health approach to viral disease places much greater emphasis on prevention rather than cure - most importantly through vaccination, which trains the body's own immune system to recognise and destroy a particular virus before it can cause serious illness. The historic elimination of smallpox, a disease caused by a virus and brought to an end worldwide t …