eli5: Why does being out in the rain increase your chances of getting sick?
In: Biology
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.
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