How do a viral disease outbreaks – Impacts
‘Virus’ a word that eventually everyone is scared of these days. Virus is a very small, infectious entity that cannot be seen by unaided eye, and can infect almost all known life forms. So obviously it is way smaller than any other life forms. Outbreaks and research about their history is quite tedious and difficult to explain, very difficult for common man to understand, but it is important.
So, you can call these notorious entities as tiny germs. As we all have DNA, RNA and proteins, so do these viruses are made up of genetic material like DNA, RNA enclosed in a protein coat. These DNA/RNA designs put assertive boundaries to these viruses to infect particular species such as certain bacteria, animals, birds and humans which are called host. Any mutation or simply changes in these genetic elements over the years or due to various environmental or man-made factors allow them to cut those boundaries of infections and switch to infect adjacent species. That’s quite dangerous. These infections have brought us across a lot of curable, and uncurable diseases. One key factor about these viruses is they cannot replicate independently; these require a host to infect and outnumber destructively by 10-fold.
Some important factors of virus:
- Genetic material of Virus: There are viruses which have DNA or RNA as their genetic material and some have a combination of the two. These can be single stranded or double stranded, and are classified accordingly as Retroviruses or Hepa-dna-viruses. Any mutations in these structures can make them destructive or even harmless and/or useful. According to the length of genetic material these can be linear or circular in shape, and can vary in size.
2) Quantification of Virus: 1 virus is termed as 1 infectious unit, which is about 30 – 100 nm in size and is quantified in ‘titre.’ Viruses that infect bacteria are quantified by ‘plaque assay’.
3) Disease and their spread: Spread of viral disease is easier than any other disease. It can affect any part of the body irrespective of internal or external. Some viruses are very specific to organs in order to cause specific respiratory, alimentary, gastric, brain or even skin diseases.
It just requires contact in terms of touch, or via secondary means such as through surfaces, body fluids, vectors, activities such as cough, sneeze, spits etc to spread virus, and these entities when spread, outnumber and cause diseases. One infected person can make a lot of people even more sick. This leads to epidemic and then a pandemic situation.
4) Mechanism of action: A virus undergoes 5 steps to act on host. Attachment to the host, Penetration into the host, Synthesis (of genetic material), Assembly and packaging of its genetic material, Bursting of the host cell to release virus.
Almost all viruses have spike which helps them for initial attachment to the host cell, which is an essential characteristic in every virus.
5) Evolution over the years: Viruses evolve over the years as they infect other species. The evolution occurs in the genetic material which makes them even more destructive when they effect different species. Many viruses that cause Swine flu, HIV, Hepatitis, Bird flu have their origin (transformation) in one species and effect other species by transmission with a greater effect. This is termed as cross-species transmission.
6) Observation aid: Electron microscope is one efficient instrument to view this small entity with clarity. It involves passage of light beam through a surface which reflects back the light which is captured computationally. While viewing the image in electron microscope, the size and structure of virus can be visible in high dimension.
Disintegrating the genetic element of the virus is the way to stop the virus to outnumber. Soaps are metal salts of higher fatty acids, and are bipolar in nature. Fats coated viruses are destroyed by soaps within 20 seconds. Thus washing hands and keeping surfaces clean with detergents or detergent containing cleaners can stop the virus to outnumber.
