Question: Are medical viruses similar to computer viruses and are the defenses similar??????

Craig O'Hare answered on 8 Mar 2017:

I really like this question!

Computer viruses aren’t physical beings, they only exist in our machines. Computer viruses are just some computer code. Medical viruses or biological viruses are pieces of genetic code (for example some DNA or a related molecule called RNA) that is covered in a protein coat that they’ve made while they were infecting our cells. You can think of a biological virus as essentially a bunch of genes that made instructions to copy themselves using someone else’s printers.

Medical viruses and computer viruses are quite similar in they ways the behave.

Both infect hosts and make them ill by interfering with their host’s normal behaviours. Biological viruses make their hosts make copies of the virus to spread to their neighbour cells. Computer viruses are made to stop your computer working normally and then use your network to spread to other computers.

I don’t know exactly how anti-virus software works I’m afraid so I can’t say if the defences are similar in great detail (My Macbook is actually at the repair shop thanks to a virus right now actually 🙁 ). But broadly speaking, when your cells are infected they send out signals to their neighbours to put up their defences to limit the spread of infection. Anti-virus software has a list of suspected files that it sends warnings to before anyone else downloads them so it protects your computer before it gets infected and infects other computers on your network.