Category:Viruses
From Hepatitis C Resource Centre
Viruses are tiny particles of protein with a core of nucleic acid (DNA or RNA). Some, including hepatitis C, are encased in a fatty envelope.
Viruses have long been thought of as the simplest living organisms although some researchers question whether a thing so entirely parasitic can actually be said to ‘live’. Of known infectious agents, only the more recently discovered prions, thought to be no more than rogue protein particles and implicated in Mad Cow Disease, are simpler in structure.
Viruses appear to have no purpose other than replicating themselves and are entirely dependent on their hosts – the living cells of other organisms to reproduce. Their survival is often costly for the host organism. But if the cost is too great – that is; if too many hosts die too quickly, the virus is unlikely to prosper, or even survive in that population, because it will die with the host.
There is some speculation that viruses began as particles of the genetic code of larger organisms that broke away and took up a separate, if dependent, existence. In their infective and transmissible form, outside the host cell where they were born, individual viral particles are called ‘virions’.
To depict the matter in layman’s terms, one could hypothesise that the large, complex organisms we call human beings relate to the earth, their host, much as viruses relate to them! Some human populations are more virulent and more devastating to their environment than others. These factors may ultimately contribute to their decline or even demise.
