How do colds cause sore throats and why are some colds worse for this than others?
In: Biology
I’m not a doctor neither am I a professional in this field.
However as long as I remember, our throats provide great condition for the virus/infection to stay and do its job.
The body realizes this and tries to fight the disease. One of its defense mechanisms is to create swelling in our throat. It apparently helps (I really don’t know how effective this is), but it really hurts.
I’m sure others can provide more and better information or maybe mention where I’m mistaken.
You get a sore throat because viruses both land in and take off from your throat and want to be there to do that cause they wanna keep living, and they need hosts, specially cells, to reproduce in.
Some viruses are worse than others because you know how to deal with some viruses really well, but not others, and the earlier your immune system catches it and the better it is at defeating it the less sick you get.
It can also be that some viruses just wanna chill, crash at yours for a few days like they have dozens of times before, eat some of your food (cells) and then when you eventually you get tired of their shit and them freeloading off of you and you kick them out (you get ‘sick’ which is actually a consequence of your immune system prioritising getting rid of the infection instead of replacing cells, and instead of the energy from food going into giving you energy to move it instead goes to the white blood cell war fund), and when you do that they don’t put up much of a fight and are easy to kick out because you’ve either kicked them out heaps of times before or you were told before you moved in (immunity through genetics) how to deal with them. It’s kind of a toxic friendship, but it isn’t super damaging overall.
Other viruses wanna come in, either by you accidentally letting them in or them just climbing through a window you accidentally left open (transmissibility) and they’ll eat ALL your food, steal all your shit, drain your bank account and piss on the rug. You might have met them before once or twice and that’ll make them slightly easier to deal with, but more often than not this is the first time you’ve met them and you haven’t been warned about them because, well, the people who got this virus typically ended up dying from it instead of recovering and having kids that they then told this virus about so the kids can get rid of it easier.
Vaccines are basically your council going around to every house in the neighbourhood (or enough houses that the virus can’t just jump from house to house and ends up dying in the street) and warning you about the virus, so if you happen to get it you know what it looks like, where it might be and how to get rid of it instead of learning that on the fly and getting it wrong and either not getting rid of it quickly and getting really sick or fucking it up so bad you die because of it.
Or, the council may purposely give you a version of the virus that looks the same and can be dealt with in the same way but won’t eat all your food, steal your shit, drain your bank account and piss on the rug, so you can practice getting rid of the real virus by getting rid of this still annoying but less harmful virus first. Then, if you do get the real virus, the lessons you learned from the practice virus can be used on the real one and you can deal with it sooner and more effectively, and hopefully not die from it.
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