The other night i was out in the rain and cold for a few hours and got home and started to feel ill – i woke up the next morning with all the regular cold-type symptoms and have felt under the weather for a few days now. It made me think – is this the same as ‘catching a cold’ from someone else and would i be able to pass this ‘illness’ on, or is it something different with similar symptoms?
In: Biology
You cannot get a cold from being outside. A cold is caused by a viral infection. “Catching a cold” is what we call being infected with a virus that causes cold symptoms.
In your case, the fact that you were out in inclement weather before you felt the symptoms was a coincidence. Someone else had already infected you days prior. It’s possible that being out in cold weather can slightly suppress your immune system and make it harder for your body to fight the virus, but if you hadn’t been infected, being out in bad weather would have had no effect on you.
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