Thread:Comments:New drug may treat virtually all viral infections/A Curse in Disguise?/reply (6)

To expand on that, a virus is actually considered unsuccessful if it kills you. While a bacterium will feed on living or dead material without really caring what harm it does, a virus needs living tissue in order to reproduce, so they usually do whatever they can to avoid killing the animals (including humans) that they infect. The flu manages to spread itself very effectively in sneezes and things, but a normal healthy adult human won't die from it - they will be miserable for a while, spread the virus to the people around them, and then recover when their body manages to kill the virus.

So this isn't so much a life-saving drug as a drug that will make people happier.

The one exception I can think of would be HIV, which does kill people if it turns into AIDS. As a whole, that is actually a very unsuccessful virus. It is spread by sexual contact, which means that most people will only pass it on to one or two other people (unless someone like Sarkozy gets it), and it can often kill the people it infects. But that is, as I said, an exception.