Viruses for dummies - corona edition - Blood Cancer Uncensored

“Know yourself, know your enemy and you shall win a hundred battles without loss” was one of the tenets of Sun Tzu’s Chinese military treatise, “The Art Of War”. Make no mistake about it, humans across the planet are at war with the tiniest of invaders. Sun Tzu’s declaration that we must know our enemy to win is no less true today that it was in 5 BC when he wrote his treatise. We have an army assembling to fight COVID19 (corona). It is an army of scientists in a race against time to know our enemy and defeat them. And our own personal army, our immune systems, will start the process of knowing corona the minute the invasion occurs.

I want to know my enemy too, so I read up on corona and his kind. I find kid’s versions of things are a helpful resource because its all so much over my head. Here is my viruses for dummies. First a question. Can hand sanitizer really kill the corona virus? Read on for the answer. Hint: its a trick question.

Hopefully anyone reading this post has also read cell biology for dummies. You need to know a little about cells to understand how viruses use them. Cells are the building blocks of life. They have an outer membrane and a nucleus. The nucleus is packed with chromosomes, DNA and genes. Genes help tell cells what to do. Brain cells, skin cells and blood cells all have different functions and genes help give them each unique instructions.

Viruses are not cells. They are tiny strands of genetic material like DNA or RNA with a protein coating. How tiny? You can’t see viruses with a regular microscope, you need an electron microscope. That makes fighting viruses more dangerous than fighting Goliath, at least David could see Goliath.

So you are on your way to the drug store to get hand sanitizer and open the door. If someone with the corona virus opened that same door before you, you might have corona virus on your hand. If you put your hand to your mouth or nose, which we do involuntarily many times a day, the enemy is inside your fort.

By now you have seen pictures of the corona virus. It has a round shape and a crown of little sinister looking club faced projections. It looks like the crown around the sun, hence the name “corona”, which is Latin for “crown”. Many medical terms have Latin origins, some med schools even teach Latin. Virus comes from the Latin word “virus” meaning poison or venom.

Once corona finds its way in your body, the mischief begins. This is the scary part. Viruses hijack our cells, with the corona virus its our lung cells. Our lung cells have the correct instructions (genes) on what they need to do. The virus latches on to these cells and injects them with the virus genes. Its why they call malware a computer virus. Computer viruses give malicious instructions, or code, to our computers. Human viruses give malicious instructions to our cells.

Once inside us, a virus attaches itself to our cells and penetrates them. Then its coating dissolves releasing the RNA (genes with bad instructions). The virus then uses the cell to make more virus particles. The infected cells then burst in a process called lysis, releasing virus particles to infect more cells. Those of us taking venetoclax may have heard of tumor lysis syndrome where venetoclax can kill blood cancer cells so rapidly that our body has a dangerous reaction when expelling the cells. Corona can damage our lungs through this lysis process, exploding our healthy cells leaving a mess behind.

Viruses trigger a personal immune response Sun Tzu would admire. We have T cells and killer cells and lymphocytes and neutrophils all jumping into action. Our lymphocytes release a valiant army of antibodies (immunogloblulins) that learn to know the enemy and neutralize it. But it is a race against time for some of us. Elderly people and people who have other preexisting illnesses may succumb to a virus before the immune system can kick in. Those of us with blood cancer can have varying degrees of an impaired immune system, our army might not assemble in time and with enough soldiers to win the war.

That is not to say those of us with blood cancer who get corona are doomed. Most of us, to varying degrees, get colds and flus and sinus infections all the time that we overcome. Some of us, but for blood cancer, are otherwise very healthy and can hang on longer to give our immune systems time to kick in. Our immune systems might be impaired to varying degrees, but that doesn’t mean they do not work at all. Our immune systems have great redundancy and resiliency. They will not give up without a fight.

While our own immune systems take the battle to corona, so do scientists. By now most everyone has some rudimentary understanding of how vaccines work. Scientists figure out how to give us a tiny piece of live, or dead, corona virus to not get us sick but to trick our bodies into making corona antibodies. If we already have corona antibodies in place when we get exposed to corona, the antibodies take out corona before it gets a foothold.

Those of us with blood cancer are more at risk with live vaccines. Live vaccines work better, but work maybe too well for those who cant fight off the slightest bit of virus. Hopefully there will be a dead vaccine too. Once the vaccine is developed and administered, herd immunity can kick in. Herd immunity occurs if enough of us get vaccinated it can protect the rest of the herd because viruses tend to die out without enough hosts to transmit it.

The war between human and viruses has been waging since the dawn of time. We have fought polio, flu, smallpox, hiv and ebola epidemics. We have beaten, or at least contained, those viruses and so we shall corona. One small silver lining is that in recent history, the deadliest viruses are not the most contagious. We might lose half the world’s population if Ebola spread like Corona. As everyone knows by now, Corona is only deadly for a very small percentage of us.

Then we have the peskiest of all viruses, the common cold, which interestingly enough is part of the family of corona respiratory viruses. Why no vaccination for the cold? Its because some 200 different types of viruses cause colds. We can vaccinate for the flu, but its guesswork because we get new strains of flu each year and have to get new vaccinations each year. I am glad measles don’t reappear in new forms each year like the flu.

There are other corona viruses like SARS and MERS, but corona viruses in general do not mutate and change as rapidly as the flu. Corona viruses also tend to wax and wane with the weather, which is why the hope is the corona pandemic will die out on its own in the summer. That will buy time for the vaccine to be developed. There will also be less hosts going forward as most of those who get corona and recover will have natural immunity.

One last fun fact about viruses. Most scientists do not consider them to be alive. They lack characteristics of other living things. They do not have cells, they do not reproduce outside of a host and they do not metabolize food. And so there you have the answer to the question does hand sanitizer kill the corona virus. No, the corona virus is a not living thing to be killed in the first place. Hand sanitizer does render it inactive. No one knows where viruses originated. A logical theory is it’s just some piece of genetic junk that escaped from a cell and evolved. I think of viruses as being somewhere in between the living and dead, like whitewalkers. 😱

Knowledge is power, said Sun Tzu. Knowing our enemy helps us know how to defeat it. The first defense is not to get corona. Wash your hands, avoid crowds, no hand shaking, eat well, sleep well and social distance. Seek medical attention if you have corona symptoms, temperature over 100.4 F (37.5 C) being a main one. Do not despair if you get corona. A compromised immune system doesn’t mean no immune system. Our little soldiers will still head out to fight and win their fair share of battles.

I hope I got this right and hope it was helpful for some.