If you spill beans on a cloth, you can shake it off. That’s like a cough, take a lozenges and you are done.
If you spill orange juice on a cloth, a washing machine cycle fixes it. Sometimes you need a soak, other times a hot cycle. Thats like having a cold or bacterial infection, it just needs more time and meds.
Sometimes you spill nutella, wine, beetroot, and bubble gum on a cloth. It’s ruined. Leave it in wine longer and the whole cloth might be ruined. That’s aids.
In some instances we spill tomato juice, the cloth is now red but we don’t mind it, that’s herpes.
Some diseases are much harder to cure because they basically “hide” in the victim’s body, making it very difficult for treatment to reach. Herpes conceals itself in nerve cells; HIV can become dormant, hiding inside infected cells and eluding treatment; and the behavior of Hepatitis is a little more complicated but a similar situation.
Rabies is another interesting case – the virus can be killed through vaccination early after treatment, but once it reaches the brain it’s impossible to cure because of the brain’s own defense mechanism, the blood-brain-barrier. Not even medication can get through the barrier, so once the virus gets there it runs amok and nothing can stop it.
The ability to cure any virus is relatively new and limited. Mostly what we do is help the body to fight it in advance with vaccination. Anti-virals can kill a virus if they can get at it in the body.
So the question becomes whether the virus can live in the body somewhere the immune system or anti-virals are unable to remove it, and whether, after having lived there for a while, it can resurge in such a way as to cause renewed illness. HIV manages this by weakening the immune system throughout, to the point where it can live anywhere. Others find a specific location where the immune system simply can’t get at it (often embedded in a specific type of tissue.
Note that severity has very little to do with viral survival. HSV is minimally dangerous, despite being chronic. Influenza can be extremely severe but doesn’t invade tissues that can let it live in the body long term.
edit per u/jourmungandr as I was behind on the state of medicine.
This seems backwards to me. The thing that makes them severe is that they are incurable. If they were curable, they would not be severe, ipso facto.
For example, you probably don’t consider eye and ear infections to be very severe because you take a short course of antibiotics and you’re fine. But before antibiotics were invented children would go blind or die all the time from them. King Francis II of France died of an ear infection at age 16.
The thing that makes these infections incurable is usually that they are resistant to the things we usually use to kill infections and they are good at evading the body’s immune system.
Herpes is not particularly severe – as many as 2/3 of all people carry HSV-1 and it does not affect their lives in any appreciable way. But it is incredibly good at hiding from the immune system so it is hard to cure.
They’re able to integrate into the host DNA and go inactive, which allows them to “hide” from the immune system and medicines. These serve as reservoirs which can reactivate at a later time and restart the active infection.
Most of our therapeutics affect different stages of the viral processes, either reducing/preventing their abilities to get into our cells, or disrupting their replicative processes once they’re in our cells in the first place.
Most of our medications only affect infectivity or replication during active infections. The problem is that (to my knowledge), we have very limited ways of dealing with latent infections. Some types of viruses can integrate into our own DNA and sit there for a long time. It’s why you can have no detectable virus, but still get sick later on.
It helps to remember that a virus is just a strand of DNA or RNA. Compare that to a bacteria which is a full cell. Being a full cell, we can create medicines (antibiotics) to destroy the bacteria cell or to bind to it to block or otherwise inhibit bacterial reproduction. It just gives a lot more options for how to stop it.
For a virus though, being just a strand of DNA or RNA, we can’t just blindly target all DNA and RNA, as that would also destroy our own DNA and RNA. And there’s no way to just destroy it. The only option is to figure out a way to bind to it to alter its ability to replicate. That means you need to specifically know for that DNA or RNA strand how to both be able to bind to it, and to alter its ability to replicate. For some viruses, one or the other can be very hard. Especially for a virus like HSV or rabies which live in the nervous system. This makes being able to bind to them impossible as the nervous system doesn’t provide access like we would for viruses in the blood, muscle, or other tissue.
For other viruses, like HIV, they integrate into our existing DNA, meaning our own DNA is now affected and programmed by the virus to create new copies whenever our own cells replicate.
And for other viruses, like Hep B, their shape just doesn’t allow for binding to it. They are basically a circle which doesn’t allow for binding to it to alter it.
Bacteria are bigger and alive, which gives you way more options when trying to kill them compared to a virus.
Imagine your body is a huge restaurant kitchen. A rogue chef named bacteria sneaks in and starts eating ingredients and cooking his own stuff. He’s also making twins of himself- not good! But you have a number of ways to get rid of him – have security boot everyone that looks like him(white blood cells), turn up the heat to sweat him out (fever), or blast ska music you know he hates but your chefs tolerate(antibiotic)
A virus is more like an order ticket that instead of cooking up a desired meal, you cook up more order tickets. Your chefs are busy and their job isn’t screening every order – it’s just filling orders! So soon your chefs are so busy filling these fake orders to make more tickets, they’re dropping the ball on other crucial orders. You can have security look for the bogus orders, but there’s WAY more to search through and they’re not as obviously different as that rogue bacteria chef. You turn up the heat, which does help, but just by slowing down your chefs who are making bogus orders. You’re blasting ska music but all it does is piss off your chefs even more – it’s not like the tickets have ears. Plus this bogus recipe somehow made it into your master cookbook. You can’t burn that and also loose all the good recipes!
Getting rid of every last ticket in your restaurant is a tall order. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t ways to stop it from taking up all your chefs time. There are also ways to reduce the chance of you sharing this bogus order with fellow restaurants. If we keep funding science, we could develop better ways to fight viruses.
Survivorship bias. The ones that are hard to cure are the ones you see prevailing. There are other severe viral infections, but they don’t spread or cause disease as much as they are being controlled.
Bacteria share a lot of features between each other. You can target those shared features and kill many types of bacteria with a single drug. Viruses tend to be more unique and you need a new drug for just about every species of virus.
Part of it is, if we could cure it, it wouldn’t be seen as severe.
There were a lot of devastating viral and bacterial infections that were incurable before antibiotics and vaccines. Now they aren’t seen as severe. Because they’re treatable or preventable.
In the case of chronic Hepatitis B infection, it is to do with how the immune system responds to the virus.
There are two distinctive proteins (antigens) on the HepB virus that the immune system can use as sites for immune cell binding – one on the surface, and one in the core of the virus. Most people that get exposed to the HepB virus develop immune system cells that bind to both those antigens. About 10% of people only develop HepB surface antigen immunity. That is entirely due to their immune system response. New-born babies exposed to HepB virus from their mother during birth have an immune system that isn’t ready to fight viruses like HepB – so they are much more likely to develop chronic HepB. Maternal HepB transmission is very common, and contributes to HepB getting established in particular population groups.
The HepB surface antigen immunity allows the body to destroy infected liver cells containing HepB virus, but only after the cell has produced new viruses that can infect new cells. It is like static trench warfare – neither side can win, but they cannot destroy the enemy. Over time, the HepB virus will mutate and this can change the surface antigen – causing the chronic HepB to get worse and cause more longterm liver damage. The end-stage of chronic HepB is cirrhosis (scarring) of the liver that damages liver function, or hepatic cancer, also due to longterm liver damage. This will happen much faster if the patient is also regularly damaging their liver – through alcohol abuse or toxins ingested from dietary sources (aflatoxins from nuts is the main problem here).
Chronic HepB is treated with antiviral drugs. These drugs add a chemical into cells that looks very similar to one of the building blocks of RNA – a nucleoside. Normal cells assemble new RNA from these nucleosides to complete protein construction, and this process is smart enough to reject the fake antiviral nucleoside. But the less complex mechanism used by the HepB virus cannot discriminate between real nucleosides and the fake antiviral ones. When the fake is added to the RNA chain, it blocks further nucleosides from being added, and the RNA chain cannot be completed. This is how the antiviral drugs for both HepB and HIV reduce viral load to undetectable. But only in a very few cases do antivirals allow complete elimination of the virus.
My chronic HepB was detected when I was a teenager. I started antivirals about 15 years ago, in my mid-40s. About 10 years ago I started a drug trial that tried to prompt my immune system to develop core HepB antigen immunity. This vaccine used antigen proteins that had been created in genetically modified yeast. That trial produced good immune system responses, but that response wasn’t strong enough or long lasting enough to effect a cure. A second trial used a similar approach, but added another drug (used to treat some forms of cancer) that modified the immune system response to make it last longer. After my first set of bloods the doctor called me and asked me to come back in, because my liver test results were very high and they were concerned I was having a bad reaction to the drugs. But they were also really excited, because such a response might indicate that my immune system was finally overrunning the HepB virus. My liver levels dropped back to normal, and DNA tests could not detect any HepB DNA. Eventually they pronounced me cured of chronic HepB, and I stopped taking antivirals. Been clear ever since. Cool, huh.
But I was the only participant in the trial with that response. It didn’t work for anyone else. A cure for me, but not the 300 million chronic HepB patients around the world. I am grateful, as it is one less thing to worry about in my own life. I am sure the search goes on for more effective approaches – maybe the use of a mRNA vaccine approach will produce a more effective immune response, or better antivirals.
To be honest, most diseases are incurable, but the big thing is mostly in medicine we manage symptoms. If it is a problem that can be fixed with surgery, we do great at that.
The list of medical illness that can be cured is very small.
Your list all have something in common, they are all viral and the fact that a virus is not alive, is tiny, and they function by entering are cells are all reasons that they are not curable.
We can treat them, but that is management and not a cure.
A lot of this question is inaccurate. Hep B and Herpes are not considered “severe”. HIV isn’t severe anymore, but it’s a chronic infection that will eventually kill you if you don’t treat it. The flu is far deadlier in the USA than HIV now. Measles will likely be another common but potentially quite deadly virus if it successfully returns due to lack of vaccine adherance. Most viruses are completely cleared from your body after you recover. Hepatitis B is typically completely cleared as well. Some are retroviruses that stick around because they modify your DNA to exist longer (HIV), and other ones hide in your nerve cells (herpes, chickenpox) where there is so little blood flow that they don’t get completely cleared. Hepatitis C is neither of these, and it was usually a chronic infection, but about 20% of people would clear it completely.
However, Hepatitis (all forms) are completely curable now. Gilead released a cure for it well over a decade ago. HIV is almost curable. They have cured people of it who are receiving a bone marrow transplant as they use bone marrow from someone who is genetically immune. They also have experimental treatments which have shown promise. A clinical trial was completed a few years ago that delayed recurrence after ARV cessation for months longer. It may eventually lead to a cure.
Herpes just isn’t a big deal. Most people don’t even know they have it. They will likely have a vaccine for it in the next 30 years, but there is no strong incentive to invent a cure. It might be developed if a platform is created that resolves other nerve hiding viruses (i.e. Shingles). It would be like creating a cure for Cytomegalovirus. Like… why bother?
There’s no medical treatment that attacks viruses directly. They all rely on alerting your body’s immune system to attack the virus.
Your immune system is remarkable, but there are a couple of things it can’t do. For example, it won’t attack nerve cells. Nerve cells are incredibly long lived and difficult to replace, so your immune system won’t touch them. If it does mistakenly attack them then you get things like Multiple Sclerosis and other autoimmune disorders. Your immune system also had a hard time passing certain barriers, such as the blood-brain barrier and the cells nuclear membrane.
Several viruses, among them Herpes, HPV and Warts, will hide in your nerve cells where the immune system can’t find them. They’ll remain dormant there for a while before breaking out and causing an infection, then retreating back to dormancy.
AIDS attacks the immune system itself. With no immune system, there’s nothing to attack the virus.
Hepatitis hides in the nucleus of your liver cells, where the immune system has a hard time finding it.
Most viruses are actually incurable. But some of them can be defeated by the immune system, and some cannot. The several hundred viruses that cause the common cold are also incurable, but the immune system defeats them relatively quickly and with little damage for the organism. So you don’t cure common cold, you alleviate the symptoms and wait for the immune system to defeat it.
However, the viruses you ask about can’t be defeated by the immune system.
Short answer? You’d never burn down a house to kill a regular ol’ spider.
The viruses you list live inside of cells we really don’t want to mess with (nerve cells, immune cells) and treatments exist to prevent them from causing any harm.
We’re working on cures, but it’s hard to kill something that’s very good at hiding in places we care a lot about.
Bacterial diseases were often incurable/fatal before antibiotics.
But bacteria are fairly large, complex microbes, and so it turns out there are a bunch of different chemicals that different natural organisms have evolved to prevent bacteria from eating them, which are very specifically effective at killing bacteria. The first effective antibiotic was purified from a mold that grows on bread.
Viruses and retroviruses are dramatically smaller microbes, and are so simple that there are a bunch of functions that they need to hijack from somebody else’s cellular machinery just to reproduce. Antiviral drugs barely work most of the time; They tend to demand interference in processes that host cells also need to survive, limiting dosage. We’re nowhere near as good at producing effective antivirals as producing effective antibiotics, and the antiviral cocktail that treated HIV was regarded as a bit of a miracle.
There’s some self-selecting bias going on here as well. By definition, the curable illnesses aren’t regarded as that serious. That leaves the incurable ones.
Comments
If you spill beans on a cloth, you can shake it off. That’s like a cough, take a lozenges and you are done.
If you spill orange juice on a cloth, a washing machine cycle fixes it. Sometimes you need a soak, other times a hot cycle. Thats like having a cold or bacterial infection, it just needs more time and meds.
Sometimes you spill nutella, wine, beetroot, and bubble gum on a cloth. It’s ruined. Leave it in wine longer and the whole cloth might be ruined. That’s aids.
In some instances we spill tomato juice, the cloth is now red but we don’t mind it, that’s herpes.
They can essentially go dormant within your body and in that state your body can’t fight them off.
That said, there have been a couple of cases of HIV being cured now using gene editing so we should get there one day.
Some diseases are much harder to cure because they basically “hide” in the victim’s body, making it very difficult for treatment to reach. Herpes conceals itself in nerve cells; HIV can become dormant, hiding inside infected cells and eluding treatment; and the behavior of Hepatitis is a little more complicated but a similar situation.
Rabies is another interesting case – the virus can be killed through vaccination early after treatment, but once it reaches the brain it’s impossible to cure because of the brain’s own defense mechanism, the blood-brain-barrier. Not even medication can get through the barrier, so once the virus gets there it runs amok and nothing can stop it.
The ability to cure any virus is relatively new and limited. Mostly what we do is help the body to fight it in advance with vaccination. Anti-virals can kill a virus if they can get at it in the body.
So the question becomes whether the virus can live in the body somewhere the immune system or anti-virals are unable to remove it, and whether, after having lived there for a while, it can resurge in such a way as to cause renewed illness. HIV manages this by weakening the immune system throughout, to the point where it can live anywhere. Others find a specific location where the immune system simply can’t get at it (often embedded in a specific type of tissue.
Note that severity has very little to do with viral survival. HSV is minimally dangerous, despite being chronic. Influenza can be extremely severe but doesn’t invade tissues that can let it live in the body long term.
edit per u/jourmungandr as I was behind on the state of medicine.
This seems backwards to me. The thing that makes them severe is that they are incurable. If they were curable, they would not be severe, ipso facto.
For example, you probably don’t consider eye and ear infections to be very severe because you take a short course of antibiotics and you’re fine. But before antibiotics were invented children would go blind or die all the time from them. King Francis II of France died of an ear infection at age 16.
The thing that makes these infections incurable is usually that they are resistant to the things we usually use to kill infections and they are good at evading the body’s immune system.
Herpes is not particularly severe – as many as 2/3 of all people carry HSV-1 and it does not affect their lives in any appreciable way. But it is incredibly good at hiding from the immune system so it is hard to cure.
They’re able to integrate into the host DNA and go inactive, which allows them to “hide” from the immune system and medicines. These serve as reservoirs which can reactivate at a later time and restart the active infection.
Most of our therapeutics affect different stages of the viral processes, either reducing/preventing their abilities to get into our cells, or disrupting their replicative processes once they’re in our cells in the first place.
Most of our medications only affect infectivity or replication during active infections. The problem is that (to my knowledge), we have very limited ways of dealing with latent infections. Some types of viruses can integrate into our own DNA and sit there for a long time. It’s why you can have no detectable virus, but still get sick later on.
It helps to remember that a virus is just a strand of DNA or RNA. Compare that to a bacteria which is a full cell. Being a full cell, we can create medicines (antibiotics) to destroy the bacteria cell or to bind to it to block or otherwise inhibit bacterial reproduction. It just gives a lot more options for how to stop it.
For a virus though, being just a strand of DNA or RNA, we can’t just blindly target all DNA and RNA, as that would also destroy our own DNA and RNA. And there’s no way to just destroy it. The only option is to figure out a way to bind to it to alter its ability to replicate. That means you need to specifically know for that DNA or RNA strand how to both be able to bind to it, and to alter its ability to replicate. For some viruses, one or the other can be very hard. Especially for a virus like HSV or rabies which live in the nervous system. This makes being able to bind to them impossible as the nervous system doesn’t provide access like we would for viruses in the blood, muscle, or other tissue.
For other viruses, like HIV, they integrate into our existing DNA, meaning our own DNA is now affected and programmed by the virus to create new copies whenever our own cells replicate.
And for other viruses, like Hep B, their shape just doesn’t allow for binding to it. They are basically a circle which doesn’t allow for binding to it to alter it.
Bacteria are bigger and alive, which gives you way more options when trying to kill them compared to a virus.
Imagine your body is a huge restaurant kitchen. A rogue chef named bacteria sneaks in and starts eating ingredients and cooking his own stuff. He’s also making twins of himself- not good! But you have a number of ways to get rid of him – have security boot everyone that looks like him(white blood cells), turn up the heat to sweat him out (fever), or blast ska music you know he hates but your chefs tolerate(antibiotic)
A virus is more like an order ticket that instead of cooking up a desired meal, you cook up more order tickets. Your chefs are busy and their job isn’t screening every order – it’s just filling orders! So soon your chefs are so busy filling these fake orders to make more tickets, they’re dropping the ball on other crucial orders. You can have security look for the bogus orders, but there’s WAY more to search through and they’re not as obviously different as that rogue bacteria chef. You turn up the heat, which does help, but just by slowing down your chefs who are making bogus orders. You’re blasting ska music but all it does is piss off your chefs even more – it’s not like the tickets have ears. Plus this bogus recipe somehow made it into your master cookbook. You can’t burn that and also loose all the good recipes!
Getting rid of every last ticket in your restaurant is a tall order. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t ways to stop it from taking up all your chefs time. There are also ways to reduce the chance of you sharing this bogus order with fellow restaurants. If we keep funding science, we could develop better ways to fight viruses.
Ngl i wonder how this sub still exists when u putting this into an LLM would give u a phenomenal answer that u could prompt further. just me?
Survivorship bias. The ones that are hard to cure are the ones you see prevailing. There are other severe viral infections, but they don’t spread or cause disease as much as they are being controlled.
Bacteria share a lot of features between each other. You can target those shared features and kill many types of bacteria with a single drug. Viruses tend to be more unique and you need a new drug for just about every species of virus.
Part of it is, if we could cure it, it wouldn’t be seen as severe.
There were a lot of devastating viral and bacterial infections that were incurable before antibiotics and vaccines. Now they aren’t seen as severe. Because they’re treatable or preventable.
In the case of chronic Hepatitis B infection, it is to do with how the immune system responds to the virus.
There are two distinctive proteins (antigens) on the HepB virus that the immune system can use as sites for immune cell binding – one on the surface, and one in the core of the virus. Most people that get exposed to the HepB virus develop immune system cells that bind to both those antigens. About 10% of people only develop HepB surface antigen immunity. That is entirely due to their immune system response. New-born babies exposed to HepB virus from their mother during birth have an immune system that isn’t ready to fight viruses like HepB – so they are much more likely to develop chronic HepB. Maternal HepB transmission is very common, and contributes to HepB getting established in particular population groups.
The HepB surface antigen immunity allows the body to destroy infected liver cells containing HepB virus, but only after the cell has produced new viruses that can infect new cells. It is like static trench warfare – neither side can win, but they cannot destroy the enemy. Over time, the HepB virus will mutate and this can change the surface antigen – causing the chronic HepB to get worse and cause more longterm liver damage. The end-stage of chronic HepB is cirrhosis (scarring) of the liver that damages liver function, or hepatic cancer, also due to longterm liver damage. This will happen much faster if the patient is also regularly damaging their liver – through alcohol abuse or toxins ingested from dietary sources (aflatoxins from nuts is the main problem here).
Chronic HepB is treated with antiviral drugs. These drugs add a chemical into cells that looks very similar to one of the building blocks of RNA – a nucleoside. Normal cells assemble new RNA from these nucleosides to complete protein construction, and this process is smart enough to reject the fake antiviral nucleoside. But the less complex mechanism used by the HepB virus cannot discriminate between real nucleosides and the fake antiviral ones. When the fake is added to the RNA chain, it blocks further nucleosides from being added, and the RNA chain cannot be completed. This is how the antiviral drugs for both HepB and HIV reduce viral load to undetectable. But only in a very few cases do antivirals allow complete elimination of the virus.
My chronic HepB was detected when I was a teenager. I started antivirals about 15 years ago, in my mid-40s. About 10 years ago I started a drug trial that tried to prompt my immune system to develop core HepB antigen immunity. This vaccine used antigen proteins that had been created in genetically modified yeast. That trial produced good immune system responses, but that response wasn’t strong enough or long lasting enough to effect a cure. A second trial used a similar approach, but added another drug (used to treat some forms of cancer) that modified the immune system response to make it last longer. After my first set of bloods the doctor called me and asked me to come back in, because my liver test results were very high and they were concerned I was having a bad reaction to the drugs. But they were also really excited, because such a response might indicate that my immune system was finally overrunning the HepB virus. My liver levels dropped back to normal, and DNA tests could not detect any HepB DNA. Eventually they pronounced me cured of chronic HepB, and I stopped taking antivirals. Been clear ever since. Cool, huh.
But I was the only participant in the trial with that response. It didn’t work for anyone else. A cure for me, but not the 300 million chronic HepB patients around the world. I am grateful, as it is one less thing to worry about in my own life. I am sure the search goes on for more effective approaches – maybe the use of a mRNA vaccine approach will produce a more effective immune response, or better antivirals.
To be honest, most diseases are incurable, but the big thing is mostly in medicine we manage symptoms. If it is a problem that can be fixed with surgery, we do great at that.
The list of medical illness that can be cured is very small.
Your list all have something in common, they are all viral and the fact that a virus is not alive, is tiny, and they function by entering are cells are all reasons that they are not curable.
We can treat them, but that is management and not a cure.
A lot of this question is inaccurate. Hep B and Herpes are not considered “severe”. HIV isn’t severe anymore, but it’s a chronic infection that will eventually kill you if you don’t treat it. The flu is far deadlier in the USA than HIV now. Measles will likely be another common but potentially quite deadly virus if it successfully returns due to lack of vaccine adherance. Most viruses are completely cleared from your body after you recover. Hepatitis B is typically completely cleared as well. Some are retroviruses that stick around because they modify your DNA to exist longer (HIV), and other ones hide in your nerve cells (herpes, chickenpox) where there is so little blood flow that they don’t get completely cleared. Hepatitis C is neither of these, and it was usually a chronic infection, but about 20% of people would clear it completely.
However, Hepatitis (all forms) are completely curable now. Gilead released a cure for it well over a decade ago. HIV is almost curable. They have cured people of it who are receiving a bone marrow transplant as they use bone marrow from someone who is genetically immune. They also have experimental treatments which have shown promise. A clinical trial was completed a few years ago that delayed recurrence after ARV cessation for months longer. It may eventually lead to a cure.
Herpes just isn’t a big deal. Most people don’t even know they have it. They will likely have a vaccine for it in the next 30 years, but there is no strong incentive to invent a cure. It might be developed if a platform is created that resolves other nerve hiding viruses (i.e. Shingles). It would be like creating a cure for Cytomegalovirus. Like… why bother?
There’s no medical treatment that attacks viruses directly. They all rely on alerting your body’s immune system to attack the virus.
Your immune system is remarkable, but there are a couple of things it can’t do. For example, it won’t attack nerve cells. Nerve cells are incredibly long lived and difficult to replace, so your immune system won’t touch them. If it does mistakenly attack them then you get things like Multiple Sclerosis and other autoimmune disorders. Your immune system also had a hard time passing certain barriers, such as the blood-brain barrier and the cells nuclear membrane.
Several viruses, among them Herpes, HPV and Warts, will hide in your nerve cells where the immune system can’t find them. They’ll remain dormant there for a while before breaking out and causing an infection, then retreating back to dormancy.
AIDS attacks the immune system itself. With no immune system, there’s nothing to attack the virus.
Hepatitis hides in the nucleus of your liver cells, where the immune system has a hard time finding it.
Some viruses write themselves into your DNA, permanently. When your cells reproduce, they also produce the virus.
Most viruses are actually incurable. But some of them can be defeated by the immune system, and some cannot. The several hundred viruses that cause the common cold are also incurable, but the immune system defeats them relatively quickly and with little damage for the organism. So you don’t cure common cold, you alleviate the symptoms and wait for the immune system to defeat it.
However, the viruses you ask about can’t be defeated by the immune system.
Others have answered the primary Q. Just to add;
Herpes isn’t severe.
HIV can be prevented in the first place with daily PreP (Pre Exposure Prophylaxis) which is 100% effective when taken correctly.
Hep B is incurable but you can get a vaccine to prevent infection in the first place.
Short answer? You’d never burn down a house to kill a regular ol’ spider.
The viruses you list live inside of cells we really don’t want to mess with (nerve cells, immune cells) and treatments exist to prevent them from causing any harm.
We’re working on cures, but it’s hard to kill something that’s very good at hiding in places we care a lot about.
Because they are too profitable to cure.
You didn’t think medicine was about making people healthier did you?
Bacterial diseases were often incurable/fatal before antibiotics.
But bacteria are fairly large, complex microbes, and so it turns out there are a bunch of different chemicals that different natural organisms have evolved to prevent bacteria from eating them, which are very specifically effective at killing bacteria. The first effective antibiotic was purified from a mold that grows on bread.
Viruses and retroviruses are dramatically smaller microbes, and are so simple that there are a bunch of functions that they need to hijack from somebody else’s cellular machinery just to reproduce. Antiviral drugs barely work most of the time; They tend to demand interference in processes that host cells also need to survive, limiting dosage. We’re nowhere near as good at producing effective antivirals as producing effective antibiotics, and the antiviral cocktail that treated HIV was regarded as a bit of a miracle.
There’s some self-selecting bias going on here as well. By definition, the curable illnesses aren’t regarded as that serious. That leaves the incurable ones.
Hard to kill some viruses, without killing the host in the process. Much like cancer.
What are some of the biggest challenges in developing cures for viral infections? Are there any promising areas of research?
Wait, so I’m stuck with this AIDS?
The most obvious and possibly true reason is– Big Pharma doesn’t want a cure. They make way more money treating disease.