Question: What is the most effective treatment for a virus and how was it discovered?

Melanie Krause answered on 13 Jun 2020:

Hi,

It depends a lot on the kind of virus.

Obviously the best way to not get sick is a successful vaccine like was already mentioned. In my work I study vaccinia virus which was the vaccine agent (hence the name) that was used to protect people from smallpox infection. This is possible because the virus strains are very similar, but vaccinia is mostly harmless to humans while smallpox killed 60-80% of the people infected and is now completely extinct from earth because of vaccination. But when it was around smallpox killed up to 500 million people throughout its existence… even Pharaoh mummies have smallpox scars on their faces. The WHO hopes to do the same with Polio soon and eradicate it by vaccination.

As to how the vaccination procedure was discovered… we can hardly imagine it now but smallpox was a huge issue for hundreds of years everywhere on earth. In China and later parts of Europe people knew if you survive the infection once you will never get it again. They tried to swallow or inhale small doses of powdered pox scabs from infected individuals as they thought its saver that way than to catch the disease naturally. Unfortunately many people who did this still got the disease and died.
Eventually an english doctor called Edward Jenner noticed that milkmaids hardly ever got sick from Smallpox. But many of these women had pox scars on their hands. These scars looked similar to the ones cows had. So he removed some of the scarred tissue from a cow and made it into powder to inject into a boy. A few weeks later he exposed the boy to smallpox and he did not get sick. (Obviously that is not how science is done anymore! 😉 ) The reason for that is that the immune system of the boy got exposed to cowpox this way but cowpox don’t cause much harm to humans and neither to cows. (There is practically a pox virus for every species on the planet.. even squirrel or mussel pox.. but most can’t infect humans). And after the immune system learned what a poxvirus looked like it could fight off the deadly smallpox much more easily! 😉

But since a treatment means treating someone who is already sick vaccines don’t apply. I think the best example here is HIV. We have not been able to find an effective vaccine but there are a lot of so called anti-retroviral drugs on the market that people with HIV have to take daily to suppress the virus production in their body. They do so by suppressing an enzyme that the virus uses to translate its genetic information within human body cells. We do not have this enzyme naturally, it only comes with the virus, so breaking it apart or inhibiting it is not dangerous for us. That was discovered because many scientists close studied HIV and its structure for years to see what would be the part where the virus is most vulnerable and they found ways to attack this enzyme.

In the 80s before these drugs existed, people would die from HIV within 10 years of infection. Now their life expectancy is nearly the same as uninfected people if their treatment is done right.

Really cool question! I just hope you didn’t fall asleep while reading my lengthy reply! 😉