Just read the thread on, “How does hand washing kill flu virus?”
Do Virus die? I thought they were some kind of spore like thing that could hang around forever.
Do they die? How long does it take?
Don’t know about viruses dying, but I know one thing that starts with L and just won’t…
It certainly wqill kill some but I am not certain that hand washing is designed to kill all or most germs. Removing them is the main thing.
No, they don’t die as such, but their genetic material or their outer coating can become damaged so they are no longer functional.
Leaving aside the issue of life/death, viruses can be deactivated, so that they’re no longer infectious. How long this takes varies from virus to virus. Most can only “survive” outside the body for a few minutes to a few hours.
I thought viruses were more like rumors than animals, that they were dead in the sense we usually think of it, and were just designed so that other cells would make copies of them.
But Richard Preston’s “The Demon in the Freezer”, about smallpox, describes it very differently:
“The tailed smallpox particles look like comets or spermatozoa. They begin to twist and wriggle, and they corkscrew through the cell, propelled by their tails toward the cell’s outer membrane. You can see them with a microscope, thrashing with the same furious drive as sperm.”