Coping with the Common Cold [antikvár]

CHAPTER 1 Nothing to sneeze at Making sure a cold is only a cold Who catches colds and when First line of defense: the nose A variety of viruses, all hostile How the infection takes hold Throat sore? Head feel stuffy and dull? Nose running like a leaky faucet and you feel a chill down to your toes? No need to ask a doctor what you have, because you know only too well. You are starting another cold, maybe your second or third this year, and one of scores you have suffered and will suffer throughout your life. If you are like most people, you may wonder from time to time why, in an age of medical miracles, someone has not come up with a cure for this most persistent and most common of human afflictions. It is a sneezing, snuffling, crying shame. Frustrated and miserable as you may feel, you can take heart in some good news about colds and other, more serious infections that resemble colds in one way or another, such as influenza (Chapter 4). After centuries of folkloric humbug and decades of scientific wanderings, researchers have in recent years begun to make major discoveries about the causes of colds. Colds, it turns out, are not a single disease that strikes over and over again but are instead perhaps as many as 200 separate, look-alike diseases, which are set in motion by any of 200 different submicroscopic agents called viruses. Cold specialists also now know a great deal about how infections are transmitted: For example, you do, indeed, "catch" a major share of the colds you suffer—with your hands. By touching droplets of virus-laden mucus—either on the body of a earner who already has a cold, or on some surface that he has recently contaminated, perhaps with a sneeze or his hand— and then rubbing your own nose or eyes, you conve- niently deliver the cold virus to the site where colds begin. Surprisingly, colds disrupt life in tropical climates with almost the same frequency that they do in the shivery dank of temperate countries such as the United States and Great Britain; colds are rarest in those parts of the world with the lowest temperatures. So far as careful experiment can discover, there is also little direct relationship between getting wet and chilled and catching a cold. But new understanding of the body's defense mechanisms is revealing why colds, once caught, are no more than a nuisance to most people most of the time, but the first step toward serious illnesses in others. The growing body of knowledge about viruses and their interactions with your body may eventually lead to ways of preventing and curing colds, as this knowledge already has produced treatments for influenza and many serious complications of colds. But for the moment, the central fact of ordinary colds is that no miracle cure, no antibiotic drug, no magic potion and no omniscient physician can alter the course of a cold once you have it. Even the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has had its nose rubbed—so to speak—in this immutable fact: It can put a man into outer space, but it cannot cure the common cold. On February 27, 1969, on the eve of a flight to orbit the earth, the clockwork countdown procedure at Cape Kennedy came to an abrupt halt when all three of the Apollo 9 crew showed the classic symptoms: smffed-up noses, sore throats and cold-related fatigue. NASA postponed the launch at an estimated cost of $500,000—the first time in 19 A cold sufferer blows a grotesque nose, already red, swollen and sore, in an early-19lh Century French lithograph. Artists of the period frequently depicted the miseries of the ailment—sometimes with compassion, but often with harsh or flippant satire.