So as your blood pumps around your body, some of the plasma seeps out of your capillaries and into the surrounding cell structure, washing away any cellular garbage like dead cells and dis-RNA’d proteins left over from the war on drugs diseases. This flows into the lymphatic system and is transported away to filtering and cleaning stations called lymph nodes and the waste eventually finds its way into the kidneys or intestines to be expelled along with the rest of the body’s waste.

Well Viruses are made of the same stuff your body is made out of anyways:

Proteins Nucleic acids And sometimes they are packaged into a phospholipid membrane.

Your body basically digests that.

Proteins get broken down into Amino acids Nucleic acids get broken down into Nucleotides The membrane gets broken down into fatty acids.

And all that is then used by your body to build and repair itself.

They're phagocytosed and broken down to components that can be recycled.

Viruses can be destroyed outside cells: Often by antibodies, but also by defenses like complement or innate immune lectins. In most cases these defenses physically stick to the outside of the virion and mark it for destruction by neutrophils, macrophages, or other specialized phagocytic cells. Phagocytosis means that the virion is taken up by these cells, and moved into extremely destructive little compartments that include acids and aggressive enzymes that break down proteins and nucleic acids down to their component parts. The resulting fragments can be recycled by the cell, or simply flushed out of the body.

Viruses can also be destroyed when they're infecting a cell. In this case the usual route is to destroy the infected cell, either by breaking it open or by forcing it into a specialized death pathway (apoptosis, or related pathways). In either case, the resulting cell debris is taken up by phagocytic cells and recycled or flushed.

Dr here. viruses mainly work by invading a cell to hijack a cell's machinery to make more copies of themselves. The body mainly responds in 3 ways macrophages, nk cells, T cells.

1. macrophages can identify infected cells, eat them up and isolate them. once eaten, they introduce acid- like particle to digest everything inside the compartment including viral particles

2. nk (natural killer cells) - will act by finding an infected cell, come up to it and do 2 things. I. insert a coded message called granzymes into the infected cell. these things tell the infected cells to suicide by self-digesting themselves. This again breaks down everything inside the cell into harmless soup. (the garbage cleaners of the body, neutrophils come later to pick these floating dead trashbags up later) II. they can also shoot out perforins. these particles attach to cell membranes, poke little holes into it, compromising the cell membrane integrity (think of it has popping a balloon)

3. cytotoxic T cells do the same thing NK cells do. granzymes and perforins.

• so bottom-line, Viruses all get digested by cells, broken up into harmless pieces of protein.

1. some of these broken down protein are used by the immune system to better identify and target viruses
2. some proteins are recycled (protein is protein, the gains baby =D)

The short answer is that they are broken up in acidified bubbles inside of cells called lysosomes. Lysosomes are meant to break down either endocytosed thing (i.e. stuff that the cell "ate" by engulfing it) or things from inside the cells (a process called autophagy).

The longer answer is that there would be 2 major pathways for this:

1. If the body makes antibodies to a virus, those are proteins which stick to the virus and signal for other cells to clear out that virus. Macrophages, white blood cells which "eat" infectious material, would then endocytose or "eat' the coated virus. Inside the cells, the virus would be in a bubble called an endosome, which will eventually merge with a lysosome and digest the virus inside.

2. An infected cell can be killed by white blood cells of two main types, natural killer (NK) cells and CD8 T-Cells. NK cells recognize infected cells more generally, rather than specific infections, whereas CD8 T-Cells are specific to particular infections, and recognize bits of protein from those infections on the cell surface. When either of those types of cell recognizes an infected cell, they signal that cell to kill itself through a process of apoptosis, in which it digests its own proteins, DNA, etc... and breaks down into multiple small vesicles (bubbles), which can then be cleaned up by macrophages.

I'm sure there's exceptions to what I've said, but these would be the two main ways.

Source: I have a PhD in cell and molecular biology specializing in viruses and I used to work on autophagy in particular, so learned a lot about the terminal digestion pathways and merging with lysosomes.

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