We are unpacking infectious diseases and how infection works in a short series of posts. We began first by explaining we are in a largely beneficial relationship with microbes including viruses, bacteria, fungi, protozoa, and helminths. However, we found some notable exceptions when we considered infectious diseases, viruses and bacteria in more detail.
Infectious Diseases, Bacteria, and Particularly Viruses
Viruses have been in the news again since the emergence of COVID-19. However, we could still fit billions of them on the head of a pin. That’s because their diameter ranges from 200 to 400 nanometers. By way of comparison, a human hair is 80,000 to 100,000 nanometers wide.
Moreover, viruses may be rod shaped, round, twenty-sided, or with fanciful multi-sided ‘heads’ and cylindrical ‘tails’. However, they all comprise packets of DNA or RNA nucleic acid in a hard shell.
But even COVID-19 viruses can achieve nothing outside a human host because infectious diseases, viruses and bacteria depend on our tacit acceptance. But once inside they can hijack their host, and cause consequences such as we now face.
Bacteria are Ancient Organisms from Billions of Years Ago
Bacteria are smarter than viruses because they have learned to make paralyzing toxins. They also know how to neutralize our bodily defenses, or evade them completely. They are behind life’s annoying irritations, including strep throat, tuberculosis, staph skin infections, and urinary tract and bloodstream infections.
Infectious diseases, viruses and bacteria can cause a perfect storm when replication errors and mutations occur. Then they can attack with new weapons our immune systems do not know.
Thus bacteria have been responsible for outbreaks of tuberculosis, typhus, plague, diphtheria, typhoid, cholera, dysentery and pneumonia. They can evolve suddenly and rapidly, instead of slowly adapting according to National Center for Biotechnology.
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