What makes a sore throat during a common cold?
In: Biology
Well with a common cold the soreness is cause by your immune system overreacting to the cold virus. Excess coughing helps spread the virus, and so viruses that tend to trick you into coughing a lot tend to spread more and be more successful as viruses. The soreness is a byproduct of inflammation and damage caused by the coughing.
Flu is a bit different because cells tend to self destruct as a way to prevent the virus from using them to replicate. So you have pretty much direct cell damage in addition to the excess coughing causing sore throats.
Pain is picked up by irritation or stimulation to nearby nerves capable of picking it up called afferent fibers.There’s an immune response to the virus like rhinovirus which loves the oropharynx..when our first responder immune cells pick up a signal of the foreign invader they release pro inflammatory signals.
The signals basically cause more blood flow to the area with more permeability of the blood vessels there causing swelling and redness. One of those signals is called prostaglandin E2. It as well as another chemical called bradykinin cause this stuff as well as pain because they also signal those nerves..
So just imagine.. someone spits in your mouth and there’s a virus in the spit droplet. It attaches to cells in your throat. That cell usually dies or houses the virus allowing it to replicate and the the cascade effect happens locally where immune cells show up, call in more immune cells, causing a lot more blood to flow in to let more immmune cells come in, and then there’s pain, swellling, and redness all in one place.
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