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Virus and antibiotics: a gentle educational program for panicking


This baby is a fluffy mimivirus with a code size of 2.5 Megabytes (a bit of the Quaternary system).

We've been monitoring channels, chat rooms and forums about the current situation in different countries. I was just freaking out about what people might come up with in a panic and illiteracy. Therefore, educational program. Not about coronavirus. Just about viruses. Little "nanorobots." And antibiotics. Which do not need to eat just like that.

We prepared an educational program together with the infectious disease specialist Victoria Valikova, who runs the clinics in Guatemala and Nicaragua. Naturally, he is full of gross simplifications.

What are viruses?


This is such a goof, what a small form of life. They are everywhere, and there are a lot of them. In a liter of ordinary sea water there are about 250,000,000,000 of them. And each of them is busy with two things:

  1. Recycling cells into their copies.
  2. Traveling in search of new cells.

About the “life form” there is a holivar, because the virion (the transport state of the virus, a particle without a cell) is just a piece of DNA or RNA code + shell + some analogue of the port connector. In this state, the virus almost does not resemble life, but rather looks like a set of instructions. And it behaves just like a printout of instructions: until someone who executes them is found, they are inactive.

If the instruction tells you how to use a photocopy machine to self-scale, can it be considered alive?

Can the virus be cured with an antibiotic?


No.

An antibiotic will do almost nothing to the virus.

What does an antibiotic do?


Kills bacteria!

A lot of. Indiscriminately. Often - gradually, starving them.

Viruses and bacteria are two different things. The virus is small (most often) and looks more like a mini-robot. Bacteria are large (compared to it) living things. Antibiotics are effective against them, but not against viruses.

At the same time, antibiotics are never a quick response detachment that will penetrate the necessary cells, mark them and send killers. So immunity can work. This is a long time. Antibiotics wet everything that fits the filter. They said that the pathogen is gram-negative aerobic ("criminal artist") - they will go and soak everything like that. In our example, all the artists in the crowd, all the people with tassels and all the sellers in the stationery stores. So what, that many innocents suffered? But the country is in order, and one specific pathogen was destroyed.

To simplify matters, consider antibiotics a controlled poison that destroys certain life forms. Fortunately, we are quite different from pathogenic bacteria, so it destroys us as a system more slowly.

Wait a minute, but does a huge pile of bacteria enter the human body?


Approximately 1.4 to 2.5 kilograms of bacteria, if you fit the Schindler list .

The mass composition of man
Nature:



( , 2,5 , «other» , , , ).

There is a huge variety of organisms that are involved in critical processes from digesting food to immunity. If you remove part of the bacteria from a person, he will live either very briefly or very sadly.

Of course, antibiotics do not kill all 2.5 kilograms of bacteria, but only those that belong to the same group as the “bad” ones. And a couple of neighboring groups. In practice, this means that there will be dysbiosis and many subsystems of the body will go into confusion and reeling. The most common case is gastrointestinal dysbiosis. In general, if it all ended in weekly diarrhea or gastritis, everything would be more or less good. In fact, microflora is restored for a rather long time, and in the process of restoration, normoflora grow in place of fungi and other secondary pathogens.

Stop-stop, but how does an antibiotic distinguish “good” bacteria from “bad" ones?


No way. He goes and wets everything according to his profile.

Broad-spectrum antibiotics (*. *) Affect as many bacteria as possible. It is assumed that if you have something inside in a small amount that is easy to kill, then they will help (therefore, they are prescribed after operations, for general protection). The second use case is when it is something dangerous, but it is not clear what exactly. It is assumed that a substantial loss of your microbiota is not as important as a substantial loss of life.

When it is clear what kind of pathogenic bacterium is comfortably settling in you, they use a narrow spectrum. This is not all in a row, but specific groups of bacteria. It is very difficult and expensive to configure them for one specific staphylococcus, so they are often specified to the level of “all staphylococci”. And there are many of them inside the body, and part of it relates to normoflora. Well, since it’s difficult to get into them, antibiotics are killed at the same time as all bacteria that multiply in a similar way, either feed in a similar way, or live in a similar environment. The logic of decision making is the same: termites settled in low-rise buildings? Burn all low-rise houses!

A narrow spectrum, like a wide one, also gives dysbiosis and other unpleasant special effects. In practice, this, among other things, means that eating an antibiotic is off topic, you weaken the body here and now, which makes it much less resistant to new external microbiological threats.

How do antibiotics kill microflora?


  1. They stop the growth of bacteria (for example, macrolides, tetracyclines, chloramphenicol and so on). It is assumed that if the bacterium does not multiply, then soon it will die for natural reasons - either it’s time already, or sooner or later it will grope and achieve our immunity.
  2. Bacteria themselves are killed (penicillins, cephalosporins, fluoroquinolones aminoglycosides, for example) due to direct attacks (for example, destruction of their walls), disturbance of their environment and so on.

Antibiotics have side effects. It was from there that the “almost” clause about viruses came from. Setting up a kill pattern on bacteria is more or less simple, but it turns out inaccurate. Some antibiotics can cling to our parasites (because they change the environment so that it will also be difficult for them to live). Some catch viruses. Tetracyclines have an antiviral effect, but affecting only the most hefty-huge viruses. When I say “hefty”, I mean the difference between the cytomegalovirus or mimivirus and the smallest. By the way, mimivirus is generally visible under a microscope, it is the size of a bacterium, and whether the virus is a holivar. The difference is that it is either 20 nanometers for small viruses, or 250-400 for large ones. A large one contains from 1 to 2.5 megabases of information (1 MB is about a million base pairs of DNA). By the way, only 27-34 kilobases of code breaks into coronaviruses, but then it’s an RNA code, that is, an analog of an already compiled code.

So, large ones, about which we could not decide for a long time whether they are bacteria or viruses, can also be accurately bitten by tetracyclines.

There are no drugs with one clear-cut action, this is biochemistry, there is always a world full of surprises and complex relationships. Just remember: if the disease is viral, treating it in the vast majority of cases with an antibiotic makes sense only when you wish the patient to die quickly. And, preferably, painful.

Why then prescribe antibiotics for viral diseases?


For two reasons:

  • Or it is not clear what pathogen caused the disease.
  • Or the virus often weakens the body so that a bacterial infection clings.

General points of treatment for infections are:
  1. Immunity almost always manages itself, but you need to give it time.
  2. This time is not always less than the expected death from infection, so you need to slow down the infection.
  3. It is necessary to establish exactly what the patient is sick with, and then give a narrowly targeted remedy against a specific pathogen.
  4. Since the tests take time, and the infection can be dangerous, it is often more justified to start with a wide range and soak all the common causes of such symptoms, and after receiving the tests, go to narrow measures. This is called "empirical therapy."
  5. Since broad-spectrum antibiotics, prescribed first, must be drunk in a whole course, usually it is only worthwhile to switch to narrow measures in completely unpleasant situations.
  6. There are pathogens that hide from the immune system, then you need to use a different algorithm.

Victoria's word:
« , , , : . . , , , . , , . , , . 90% . . , . — , , , , . -, , ( , , ) — ».

For example, in a number of COVID-19 schemes there are macrolides - they are needed, because as a result of everything that happens, there is a high probability of catching staphylococcus, which is just waiting for a good opportunity. Well, even the virus will weaken the body itself, therefore, also a surprise. It will be somehow stupid to recover from the coronavirus, then to die immediately from a secondary infection, so you also have to fight it. But on time and under control.
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I will add that the chances of the next pandemic are quite high for yourself with some kind of pathogen with multiresistance. That is, they have been around for a long time, but so far we are lucky with the fact that they have not spread to the whole planet. Why? Because nefig eat all antibiotics in a row and nefig sprinkle fields and rivers with them. Here is one of the most entertaining and detailed Wiki articles on antibiotic resistance , read if you are interested in the scenarios of the next apocalypse.

Ok, how does the virus work then?


Very simplifying, our set of instructions traveling around the world is waiting for some cell to “read” it. When a virus enters its surface, it can “stick” into certain proteins, which its “output port” is configured to. Interacting through them, he shoves (he shoves it through natural processes) through the wall of the cell and enters the area where all the instructions of this cell lie. And it falls to lie there until the cell begins to use it as its main instruction, and not what was there before. Once again: it's not like that at all, but the principle is something like this.

The instructions say how to remake a cell for new viruses. Evolution has led to the fact that it often turns out and more profitable to do it more or less completely, as a result of which the cell dies. In the article "Marine viruses - major players in the global ecosystem ”mentions that viruses kill about 20% of ocean microbiomass in a day. Average formula: 1 host (cell) + 1 virus = 50 viruses.

There are not only bacteriophages. Viruses infect everything they find. There are so many of them and they are so different that they work out all the possible threats. Plants, animals, bacteria, archaea - will go to everyone. There are viruses that can multiply in cells that are already infected with some other specific virus and partially rearranged. There are even virusy- virofagi to substitute a set of instructions in other viruses. That is, viruses can also get a viral disease.

Vulnerable virus in the following conditions:
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« , , . -. . , — , . , . , , . — , . , . , . () . ! ( ), . , , . . , - . , , . . . , . . , , ».

, ?


Do not get infected.
Do not panic and do not commit unnecessary actions like taking antibiotics.
If infected - do not infect others.
Contact the doctor in time. Then he will choose a strategy.

How not to get infected?
Either observe safety measures, or vaccinate.
Yes, you must vaccinate in advance.
Yes, you need to think about it.

In the meantime, you can look at the demo version of the world without vaccines.

Here is the old vaccination material . Here is the last post about COVID-19 and transport . Thanks again to Victoria. Her clinic in Nicaragua is here in Guatemala , and here is an old interview about her work in general.

So:

  • Antibiotics almost do not take viruses, but often worsen the body's resistance to them.
  • Do not eat antibiotics without the direct appointment of a doctor. Do not!
  • Do not stop drinking antibiotics until the course prescribed by your doctor is over. Even if you feel better. There will be no second chance to recover during the next serious illness.
  • It is better to be treated by a doctor.

Separately, I note that relatives, friends, healers and advice on the Internet - this is not a doctor.

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