eli5: Why does being out in the rain increase your chances of getting sick?
In: Biology
According to research it doesn’t, we just associate any later sickness with being out in the rain.
Getting your nose cold makes the immune cells that are patrolling there less effective at fighting off invaders, such as viruses or bacteria. So while cold itself cannot make you sick, it can increase the odds of infection. Being out in the rain, therefore, can do the same thing, if the result is that you get cold.
Well, no. Being out in the rain itself does not directly cause illness. The idea that being in the rain can make you sick is a common misconception. Colds and other illnesses are caused by viruses or bacteria, not by getting wet.
However, there are a few reasons why people might associate rain with an increased risk of illness, e.g. cold weather (can weaken the immune system).
Any form of prolonged physical stress can weaken the immune response. Rain itself won’t make you sick, but being cold and wet for a long period of time will make you more susceptible to catching an illness.
Do you have a source for this claim?
Do people in less rainy places get less sick?
Consider your body as an army. Every day it fight against numerous diseases to keep you healthy. 99.9% of the time it wins. When it loses, you fall sick and your body has to fight even harder while the army is now fighting on two front: Inside and outside.
Anything that make your body weaker or less efficient in any way shape or form lower the effectiveness of said army until things go back to normal. Among the things that can influence it: Ingesting the wrong stuff (basically using a trojan horse to pass disease directly to another part of your system without properly fighting it first), getting physically hurt, which damage some part of your body making the “army” weaker at that point and falling sick easier. Or the ones that we’re interested in right now: Drastically altering your external temperature.
Water take heat away. But your body need the temperature 1) to make some of its system function and 2) to kill some weaker disease (they can die solely from appropriate temperature). As a result, not only is your body not working at peak efficiency when cold making that army weaker, your body will also expand more resources to try and warm you up to keep you fighting. Resources that could have been used somewhere else for better results.
TL:DR Rain is cold water and make you lose heat faster, which make your immune system weaker.
Another risk of getting caught in the rain is hypothermia. A friend in Arizona was biking, got caught in a downpour, and got hypothermic as he dried off due to evaporation drawing off heat. He started shivering and his muscles locked up.
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