Cold Virus
Rhinovirus. Rhino = nose. The cold virus accesses the body through the nose and mouth, and it uses the cells in the sinuses and throat to replicate.
Viruses require a host cell to replicate, therefore they don’t live very long outside of a host. The cold virus can live on a surface for about 3 hours.
During the initial infection and multiplication stages (first 3 days), you are the most contagious even though you have no symptoms of being sick.
Cold symptoms
- Runny Nose
- Scratchy throat
- Cough
- Sinus congestion
- Tiredness
- Mild fever
- Possible body aches
“Morning sniffles” not a cold.
Your tonsils are a major hub of your immune system. So, when your body recognizes that it’s been infected by a virus, the immune system is activated. Sometimes, the first symptom people experience with a cold is a sore throat because the tonsils go into overdrive when the immune system is activated.
Prevent a Cold
Always wash your hands (in soap and water or hand sanitizer). Touching your face can allow germs to enter your body but can spread your germs to other surfaces or people.
Learn to sneeze or cough into your elbows. It keeps the spray from getting on your hands or surfaces and items around you.
Use sanitizing wipes to clean surfaces you may touch regularly or that you know someone sick has touched.
Why don’t we vaccinate for the cold?
Vaccines are prioritized a few ways. We want to vaccinate against things that:
- kill people.
Colds don’t kill a lot people, they just make us miserable and miss work. - spread really fast.
Flu, measles, chicken pox all spread rapidly through the population due to droplet exposure. - have slow-changing characteristics.
There are 99 different version of the “cold” virus, but each one is fundamentally different. So you would have to get 99 vaccines!
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