Why can't AIDS be cured by antibiotics?

Since HIV causes AIDS and AIDS acts by destroying a person's immune system, preventing the lymphocytes from producing sufficient antibodies to fight infection, wont antibiotics help the lymphocytes to combat the forein particles eg. bacteria/viruses?

The HIV virus is a VIRUS. Antobiotics don't work on viruses.

No because Aids is Auto immune. Last time I checked you can't cure auto immune with antibiotics.

Antibiotics aren't like you naturally occurring antibodies. Antibodies are made to attack foreign things in you body such as disease.

Antibiotics are made in a lab so they cant read or define genetic material which means they will attack almost anything in your body its sees as threat.

The problem with this is that in some circumstances antibiotics will attack parts of the immune system weakening it even more making it worse.

Also another big difference between antibodies and antibiotics is the body can adapt to antibiotics stopping them from having any effect. So being on them for life would be a bad idea. Antibodies are good because they attack the disease before symptoms present in the body. They also learn or evolve how to fight diseases.

Antibiotics can only be administrated after thee disease presents and at th point unfortunately the disease will almost be impossible to stop for people with a immune problem.



I guess really nothing can compare to your own immune system.

antibiotics treat bacterial infection, not viral infection. antibiotics are not the same thing at all as antibodies, they just sound similar.

in any case, you could not cure AIDS with an antibody supplement because you would only be curing the symptoms, not the disease itself, which is caused by a virus. the immune system would still be damaged.

Antibiotics are useless against viruses. That's why they treat viruses like herpes etc. with anti virals. An auto immune disease is your own body attacking its self.Some examples of auto immune diseases are Lupus, Multiple Sclerosis, Rhumatoid arthritis.

antibiotics dont touch viruses

cuzz antiobiotics help cure infections that are made by bacteria only nd aids isnt bacteria,its a virus
"Acquired immune deficiency syndrome"

antibiotics work by stoping a certain bacterial pathway of replication and do nothing to hinder virus replication. HIV also has an extremely high rate of mutation which overcomes antiviral drugs with time. Not to mention, hiv attacks and destroys t helper lympocytes which are the signaling cells which help " direct" the immune system. It is extremely complicated. Get a basic immulogy textbook and take lots of time if you want a thorough answer to your question.

because its a virus

Because it's a disease that originated having to do with perversity and promiscuity. Hence, the cure lies in a lifestyle change.

There is no medical cure, nor will there ever be.

Send your concerns to answers@drugqna.com.
Docs will give you the clear answers without cost.

Drink vodka. A guy with 17 letters after his name told me this. One teaspoon a day. I, of course do a little more than that.

HIV is a virus that attacks CD4+ white blood cells (and a couple of other cell types, too). It is not bacteria.

Basically, a virus is a bit of DNA or RNA encapsulated in a protein shell with perhaps a couple other things. Viruses are not living and they cannot reproduce on their own... that's why they invade other cells. They hijack the cell's machinery, use its nutrients, and reproduce genetics copies of themselves. When they're done, the cell is destroyed, and they burst out of it (they lyse the cell).

Antibiotics do not work against viruses, they only work against bacteria (which are whole, living cells). You can't cure a cold or the flu with antibioitics either. This is because antibiotics target certain aspects of a cell's machinery. Some target the peptidoglycidan, preventing the cell from undergoing cytokinesis. Others attack parts of them that are required for the translations of proteins (eg, by binding to certain transcription factors). Viruses don't have these things, and they cannot be targeted. The only way to attack a virus, pretty much, is to destroy its capsid (assuming the environment will then destroy the genetic material, which is pretty likely), attack it genetically (which carries with it a whole host of problems since you, too, have DNA), or something like that.

Fortunately (if I can get away with saying that anything about HIV is fortunate) HIV is a retrovirus. Life (cells to humans) go in this order: DNA -> RNA -> proteins. HIV does this: RNA->DNA->RNA->proteins. There is a whole step there that only retroviruses (like HIV) have, and this is one of the aspects of HIV that can be targeted. You may have heard the term "reverse transcriptase inhibitor" -- that's what this sort of medication does.

Antibiotics, however, don't attack reverse transcriptase, they don't attack the viral capsid, HIV's envelope, or anything of the sort. They attack things that HIV, or any virus for that matter, simply don't have.

As you point out, though, antibiotics *are* useful in terms of battling bacterial infections that an HIV positive individual would have more trouble than others fighting because of a depressed immune system. Similarly, chemotherapy helps combat cancers that HIV positive persons are susceptible to. Neither, however, attacks HIV specifically or any other virus for that matter.

So, in short, antibiotic will help what remains of the immune system fight off bacterial infections, but they will not have any direct effect on the HIV itself because HIV is a virus.

AIDS is not autoimmune... it is like you said. Antibiotics are actually helpful when an AIDS patient gets an infection that is susceptible to antibiotic treatment, but they are less reliable and take longer to work in the immune-suppressed body of an AIDS patient. Unfortunately, there are also lots of diseases that are completely untreatable by antibiotics. All viruses fall into this category, for example.

check out this research group ...someone there might know http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/