I mean common cold has been around for a long time. How has the immune system not learned how to fight it?
In: Biology
The Immune System is ready to combat most viruses and bacteria however it first has to create the correct anti bodies to get rid of them(they mutate and change all the time, so you could have a cold after the cold but from a different strain your immune system has to analyze all over again). This takes some time, that’s the main reason why you will always have the flu or common colds for 7-10 days, you can get well sooner by using penicillin but that’s only because it gets rid of most bacteria not the viruses themselves and often only the symptoms will be less severe as your immune system can concentrate on getting rid of the virus.
The common cold is really a colloquial term for an entire family of multiple rapidly evolving rhinoviruses.
They are different enough that an immune response to one might not affect another and evolve often enough that it might not work on the same one twice.
Because it mutates. Your immune to the last variant you had but this one is slightly different so you don’t have the antibodies to fight it yet.
Imagine you built a wall around your house to keep out amazon’s really annoying drones.
Unfortunately, Amazon is very clever and has made it so it’s drones get better every time they try and get around your wall. Eventually, they do, and you gotta build a better ball.
Viruses are natures version of these dicky drones.
Most common cause of the cold is the rhinovirus, which has many different strains (> 60). This is why you keep catching colds and also why, as you age, they become less frequent
Cold symptoms can be caused by a multitude of viruses. When I get a cold here at home in Canada it’s a 2 or 3 day event where the worst ever is a week. I got a cold once with a European strain of something (I travelled there for 2 weeks and worsened on the plane ride home) that knocked my sense of smell out for 10 days and wrecked my ears for over 8 months with serious fluid build up. I had severe neck and shoulder pain and a small palsy. I couldn’t purse my lips properly to whistle because of the fluid in my face
“The Common Cold” makes it sound like it’s one disease, it’s not, it’s a family of hundreds of different viruses all of which are capable of changing over time through mutations.
There is no one cold virus. There are about 200 viruses that cause cold like symptoms. Most are rhinoviruses (about 10% are corona viruses). You likely have immunity to many, just not all. That’s why kids get so many more colds than adults.
You probably are – who knows how many “common colds” your body has fought off. Some make it through though.
If you want a recent example of how absolutely awful humans are at basic hygiene in the face of a single pathogen, just look at Covid. People massively overestimate the safety and effectiveness of their habits even in the face of a virus we have a vaccine to. People are forced to care more about their income for a single day than public health. All a virus has to do is mutate and not be deadly enough to kill off the host species (or make us care enough to eradicate it) and it’ll stick around.
Latest Answers