If symptoms of a cold are just the body fighting the cold, what is the real harm of being sick?
In: Biology
Almost any virus is harmful because they are parasites. Viruses reproduce by entering a host cell and using its resources to copy itself, then the cell bursts open releasing more of the virus that does this again and again.
Now naturally this is bad because the virus is destroying your cells to make copies of itself.
The cold virus isn’t very good at this though. In almost all cases (except people whose immune system doesn’t work properly) we get over a cold in about 5 to 7 days.
However, there are some people with an immune system that doesn’t work well, and in those people colds are a real danger because the virus destroys their healthy cells.
So your immune system is really, really important. But that doesn’t mean that your immune system’s way of dealing with the virus is fun or nice. To speed up the production of white blood cells (that capture and contain the virus cells) your body turns up the heat! This also makes conditions unpleasant for the virus.
Unfortunately it also makes things pretty unpleasant for you when you are running a fever.
But your immune system does this for a very good reason.
The problem with the common cold is that your immune system tends to over-react a bit. It hits the big red PANIC button when actually a less severe reaction would probably do the trick. The reason for this may be buried in humanity’s distant past where a virus that looked a lot like the common cold was actually really dangerous, and so our bodies are programmed to react this way – because all the people who didn’t react this way died in the past.
So does our immune system over-react to a common cold? Yes. Is it unpleasant? Yes. Could we deal with colds with a less severe reactions? Yes. Could we deal with the cold with no reaction? No. We’d die. Because all viruses are fundamentally dangerous because they are parasites.
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