Bacteria produce harmful chemicals as part of their life processes. They use up your body’s resources (like eating your sugar or even eating your cells) and spit out toxic waste. Sometimes that waste is specifically designed to protect the bacteria by killing your immune system cells that try to attack it. But it also just basically poops all up in your body, which causes some damage. The symptoms of bacterial infections are related to what waste products the bacteria produces and where the bacteria is living. Your body fights bacterial infections by basically eating them, along with some other toxic chemicals that destroy them.
Viruses hijack the DNA in your cells to make more of the virus. They invade the cell and tell it to stop doing whatever it’s doing that your body needs it to do, and instead all it does is manufacture more of that virus. Eventually, the cell dies - usually by literally exploding - when it fills up with copies of the virus. Those viruses go on to infect other cells. Viral symptoms are caused by your body’s own attempt to kill them, and by the deaths of the cells they’re infecting. Your body fights viruses also by eating them, but it’s harder because they’re a lot smaller and have special protein shells that disguise them as “totally not a virus don’t eat me you guys”.
For extra fun, there are also prion diseases! Prions are proteins that folded the wrong way. When properly-folded proteins come into contact with prions, they re-fold into the same wrong shape as the prion. Your body can’t do anything about it because although it’s folded wrong, it’s still a protein that’s supposed to be there. Proteins are the way your body communicates and accomplishes certain things, so folding them wrong can really muck-up what is supposed to happen. In the case of Mad Cow Disease, as more and more proteins turn into prions, your brain turns to mush and gets holes in it until you go crazy and die.
If you think of your body as a factory that builds cars: bacteria are like a drunk hobo sneaking into your factory and dumping empty wine bottles into the machinery so it breaks. Viruses are like a roomba wandered in and reprogrammed your factory to start making more factory-invading roombas instead of cars. Prions are like a weird European car showed up and crashed into one of your factory’s cars after it left the factory, and now they both keep crashing into other cars (which then go on to crash into more cars) and also they all keep crashing into your factory.
Also fungal infections. Fungi can’t produce their own food, so they steal yours. Often that means invading parts of your body to get to it, and dumping toxic waste like bacteria. In the factory, a fungus would be someone building a shed attached to your factory and stealing your power so your factory doesn’t have enough to run and dumping garbage into your factory.
Also also, parasites. Parasites do the same thing as bacteria, but they’re [often] multicellular, so they’re much larger. Instead of a bunch of them, it’s usually a few big ones (although sometimes also a lot of them). In the factory, a parasite would be like the mafia moving into your factory, breaking stuff, and punching you right in the kidneys (or more likely, in the intestines) while they steal your money.
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