If you come down with the flu, should your physician prescribe an antibiotic for you? Explain why or why not.

Question

Accepted Answer

Hello everyone and welcome to today's video. So today we have that. Which of the following correctly explains why antibiotics are ineffective against viral infections. And let me just underline this word, viral book is remember that we're dealing dealing with viruses. So now let me quickly remind you of a very important fact about antibiotics in terms of how they work. And we have the antibiotics target the bacterial cell wall and metabolism. Now since we have a viral infection and antibiotics target bacteria, we can already see where this is going in terms of wider, ineffective against viruses. But still let's go over answer choices so that we can solve the problem. First of all, we have answer choice. A antibiotics are intended to disrupt bacterial metabolic activity. As you can see here they do target the metabolism of bacteria and stop stop it from reproducing. So this is actually going to be a correct statement and we will not cancel it out. Then we have viruses unlike bacteria do not have cell walls. So here we are starting to understand why this is so relevant. Remember that viruses do not have a cell wall. Instead they have something called a capsule which is a protein code. Since these antibiotics target the set wall the cell wall. Another cup said this is why they're ineffective against viruses. So it is a correct statement as well. And we will not cancel it out. And then we have viruses utilize the machinery of the host cell to replicate and this is related to metabolism. So they use the machinery of the host cell to undergo metabolism so the antibiotics will not be able to target their metabolism directly. So this is what this answer choice is trying to say is actually a correct statement as well, and will not cancel it out. So since we were not able to cancel out any of our answer choices will highlight answer choice D all of the above as the final answer to our question. I really hope this video helped you, and I hope to see you on the next one.

If you come down with the flu, should your physician prescribe an antibiotic for you? Explain why or why not.

Verified video answer for a similar problem:

Key Concepts

Viral vs. Bacterial Infections

Antibiotic Resistance

Symptomatic Treatment of Viral Infections