• Question: what is the hardest virus to fight and where would covid fall on that list? would aliens have the same immune systems or different what are your views on alien viruses and would are immune system be able to fight them

    Asked by knee449pew on 27 Jan 2022.
    • Photo: Samuel Ellis

      Samuel Ellis answered on 27 Jan 2022:

      Sneaking a few different questions in there!

      Hardest to fight depends on your definition. In terms of difficulty stopping it spreading, covid is pretty high on the list (especially Omicron variant) although others like measles are also very contagious without vaccination.

      If you mean fight as in keep someone who catches it from dying, then covid is a lot lower as it has a fairly low fatality rate (thankfully!). There are some viruses like Marburg and Ebola which sadly kill most people who are infected.

      As for aliens.. cannot say for sure as we have never found an alien to study its biology! However most viruses adapt to infect only a certain type of host, so chances are that aliens would probably be different enough from humans that our viruses would not work on each other. That is my guess ha

    • Photo: Melanie Krause

      Melanie Krause answered on 30 Jan 2022:

      Hi 🙂

      1) I think people will have differing opinions on this but in my eyes the hardest to fight in terms of vaccine creation is HIV because it specifically infects immune cells and scientists have spend decades on vaccine making with little success.. that said there are very good drugs on the market for people so an infection is manageable now
      2) Aliens would have very different immune systems… if they did not evolve on earth their DNA probably would look completely different too (if they have DNA… maybe it would be sth else). And DNA is shared between all organisms on earth. Our immune system is already quite different from the one of lets say a turtle. Aliens would have one that is more different from us than the immune system of a plant.
      3) If an alien virus would come to earth if probably would not be able to infect us because its adapted to the immune system of aliens would not know what to do with our body.. like bacterial viruses can’t harm us

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