RE: The great internal war with the viruses - Episode 1 - The initial response to infection
You are viewing a single comment's thread:
Well, the word virus is indeed based on Latin word which meant poisonous secretions. That would be akin to what we now call venom. But over the course of time the word virus had taken a completely different meaning.
A virus is a piece of genetic code wrapped in some protein and lipid membrane, with one goal - to produce more copies of that genetic code. And for this it holds our cell hostage. A poison is any substance that when ingested, injected or absorbed causes illness and death. So while yeah you can loosely think of a pathogenic virus, bacteria or fungus as a poison but the usage of word poison is majorly for chemically toxic substance. Living organisms such as snakes, plants, fungus and bacteria do secrete toxic substances nevertheless. For e.g. botulism toxin, also used in BoTox come from a bacteria and is one of the most potent toxin known to mankind.
Neatly avoiding three out of four questions? Interesting.
Maybe I missed. I see I have answered your question on - virus vs poison. Radiation poisoning and response of body to it. I am not sure what you meant by last question of best defence? I will sure try to answer that too if you can elaborate.