cold

Don’t Share Your Cold [Show Notes]

 in Podcasts  tagged cold / cough / hand washing / immune system / sneeze / virus by

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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Music Credits:  “Radio Martini” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)  Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0  http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

The Flu or an Imposter? [Show Notes]

 in Podcasts  tagged adenovirus / cold / corona virus / flu / symptoms / vaccine by

5 other viruses that cause “flu” symptoms

  1. Rhinovirus (cold) – most colds don’t come with a high fever, but the other symptoms are present.
  2. Coronavirus (SARS) – includes gastritis, nausea, and vomiting on top of the other symptoms
  3. RSV – usually prominent in kids and leads to hospitalization due to the respiratory inflammation that can lead to an emergency
  4. Adenovirus – first isolated in the adenoids; responsible for viral tonsillitis
  5. Parainfluenza virus – in the 50’s, they would swab the mouth or throat to determine what was making a person sick.  There was a group of kids sick with the “flu” symptoms.  The doctors swabbed all these kids and noticed that some showed a virus that wasn’t the influenza virus they were used to seeing, so it’s name essentially means “around influenza”.

These viruses have nothing in their makeup similar to influenza, therefore, the flu shot will not protect you against these.

Are flu shots really worthwhile?

The short answer, yes.  It not only keeps the shot-getter protected (and even a little protection is better than none at all), it keeps healthy people from being carriers of the virus from spreading it to weaker members of the population (little kids, elderly, immunocompromised).  And while the flu isn’t the primary reason people end up hospitalized or dying, the secondary complications (i.e. pneumonia) are what can kill people.  Getting the flu shot is a simple and quick process, and is also relatively painless.

And there is absolutely NOTHING in the flu shot that can give you the flu.  Your body can have an immune response because that’s the point of the shot, to activate your immune system so it’ll learn what to do if the real flu shows up.  But obviously there are 5 other viruses you can catch that will give you symptoms identical to the flu.

Do more people get sick now than a few years back?

More people on the planet means more people probably get sick.  But if we have a preventable disease and people choose not to prevent it (in themselves or their kids), then more people will start getting it (aka measles).  We had almost eradicated measles from the US until a larger group of people decided not to get their kids vaccinated, and now it has resurged.  Children worldwide die from measles, why would we want to put our own kids at that risk?

Despite the poorly matched vaccine in recent years, those that got the flu reported shorter duration and milder symptoms.

And obviously, the flu shot is not the only thing that is going to protect you from the flu this winter.

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Music Credits:  “Radio Martini” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)  Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0  http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/