• Question: Why are colds so common?

    Asked by jwalker to Jen, Jill, Mel, Phil, Stef on 16 Mar 2013. This question was also asked by lilygrainger27.
    • Photo: Jennifer Paxton

      Jennifer Paxton answered on 16 Mar 2013:

      Well what we know as a typical “cold” can actually be caused by lots and lots of different viruses and the body can’t build up resistance to every single type, so that’s why they are so common!

      Antibiotics will not sure the common cold and if you want to know why read here…..

      /healthm13-zone/2013/03/06/whats-the-difference-between-bacteriaand-virus/

    • Photo: Stefan Piatek

      Stefan Piatek answered on 16 Mar 2013:

      I would say that cold are so common is because generally they’re really mild. This might not make immediate sense, but basically a virus wants to replicate in a host and spread to a new one. It usually isn’t in their favour to kill the person their infecting because they usually need the person to spread the disease to other people.

      Colds (a virus called rhinovirus because they’re in your nose) do really well because they don’t make you feel too bad to stop you from doing anything, so a lot of people just go into work/school and spread it to others. Also they can be spread by sneezing – through the air or by coming into contact with someone who has the infection which means that they can spread pretty quickly indeed.

      If you have any questions from that let me know

    • Photo: Phil Rice

      Phil Rice answered on 18 Mar 2013:

      This is because for other viruses such as herpes viruses, HIV, hepatitis etc, these viruses can come back to life as they live silently in your body and reactivate from time to time or simply avoid being attacked by the immune system. Colds on the other hand are quite easily dealt with by the immune system and dont live in our bodies for ever so we many, many types of the same virus – e.g. 100 types of common cold virus, 90 types of adenovirus, 100 type of wart virus etc. Good question.

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