What are antiviral drugs?
antiviral drugs are a type of drugs used to treat viral infections, including human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), herpes, hepatitis and influenza. They are one type of antimicrobial drugs, a class of drugs that fights harmful microorganisms in the body. Other types are antibiotics for bacteria, antifungals for fungal infections and antiparasitic drugs for parasite infections.
Like other antimicrobials, antiviral drugs are given to the patient to treat infection in the body and are relatively harmless to the patient. The poisons used to kill viruses outside the body are known as viricides. Antibiotics and antivirals are aimed at acting against specific organisms. Both are also subjected to a drug resistance in which the target organism develops resistance to the drug, causing it to become less effective over time.
antiviral drugs work a little differently than antibiotics, because viruses and bacteria work in different ways. While most antibiotics destroy bActeria, most antivirols only inhibit the growth of the target virus. Antivirals cannot be used to destroy the virus because viruses use host cells to replicate, so the destruction of viral cells would mean the destruction of the host body cells and would cause more damage than good. Because viruses use host cells for replication, antiviral drugs are more complex than antibiotics and have appeared on the pharmaceutical scene relatively late. Only in the 80s, when scientists were able to discover in detail the genetic sequences and life cycle of viruses can be reliably produced by antivirols.
In earlier medicine, it was only possible to prevent vaccination, but it was difficult to treat them as soon as the infection occurred. Vaccines usually work by infecting the patient with weak target virus voltage, allowing its immune system to develop anti. Vaccines are not only ineffective PROti established viral infections, but also have difficulty solving fast -mutating viruses such as flu.
Unlike bacteria, viruses consist only of genome and lack cellular structures of other organisms, which makes them unable to reproduce them themselves. Therefore, they require the host reproduction. Antiviral drugs focus on viruses at different stages of their life cycle and inhibit them before reproduction to stop or slow the spread of infection.
various antiviral drugs work in different ways. They may target host cells, which make them resistant to viral infection, or can work on viruses in the host cell and interfere with their reproductive mechanisms to prevent the virus from spreading to new cells. They may also prevent the assembly of viral components into complete viral particles in the host cell or the release of the virus.