• Question: are there any theories on how to safely kill viruses once they have already caught the disease?

    Asked by 10ashtonr to Nicola on 15 Mar 2013.
    • Photo: Nicola Wardrop

      Nicola Wardrop answered on 15 Mar 2013:


      If you catch a virus, there aren’t really any very good medicines that will kill the virus unfortunately. So if someone has something like flu, hepatitis, or HIV…there are some drugs available that might help, but they are not really that good, so quite often in is not possible to kill it off (although with some, like flu, they will eventually go away on their own). Bacteria, on the other hand, are a bit easier to kill once someone has the disease, as we can use antibiotics which are quite safe. Parasites are a bit mixed, some are easy to kill, but others are not.

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