B1: 1.6 - Using drugs to treat disease

When you are ill, you generally take medicines which contain useful drugs. Drugs like aspirin and and paracetamol are examples of this.
1. Many of the drugs you buy like this relieve your symptoms but do not kill the pathogens. They do not cure you any faster, you have to wait for your immune system to overcome pathogens.
We use antiseptics and disinfectants to kill bacteria outside the body, but they are far to poisonous to us, it'll kill us and the pathogen at the same time.
Antibiotics are medicine that can work inside your body to kill bacteria that cause disease.
1. It works inside the body, damaging the bacterial cells, without our cells.
Antibiotics are not the complete answer to our problems, since viral pathogens reproduce inside our cells.
1. It's hard to find a drug that kills the virus without damaging our cells and tissues.

Resource summary

	Created by cole060100 over 8 years ago