Published: May 29, 2007 04:57 pm      

surviving the common cold

Somerset — Walk around. Anywhere. You’re sure to see them. The red noses. The weary eyes. The tissues at the ready for anticipated sneezes.

All the sinister handiwork of (cue menacing music) ... the common cold. (Eeeeeekkkk!)

The common cold is a survivor. It has the tenacity of the cockroach. As a virus, it changes its face, so to speak, each cold season. And despite the whole of mankind’s technological accomplishments — everything from pausing live TV to putting a man on the moon to keeping the hot side hot and the cool side cool — we haven’t found the cure for this little rascal yet.

In fact, the common cold is devious. Misconceptions and bad information abound about the cold, and have done so for years.

And how do we pay the price? Well, in most cases, with severe inconvenience. The cold doesn’t harm you enough to keep you away from work most of the time, so you end up having to expend your normal amount of energy while being dragged down by a nasty old virus, sapping your strength, causing you to annoy everyone with your sniffles, and propagating itself through the spread of germs. On the other hand, it MIGHT be bad enough to keep you in bed, all swollen and snotty, and that’s hardly a preferable alternative.

While there is no cure, we have ways of treating colds (or as they say in sports, you can’t stop the common cold, you can only hope to contain it). Unfortunately, this is where the cold has proven tricky, fooling people over the years. Just think about these old chestnuts:

Feed a cold

We’ve all heard the old wive’s tale about “feeding a cold and starving a fever.” The thing is, there’s no scientific basis for this, just folk wisdom. Presumably, you wouldn’t want to feed anyone anymore than normal — although cold season is a boom period for the chicken soup industry — and overfeeding is the primary cause of another health problem: obesity. So while you don’t want to starve someone suffering from a cold, you don’t want to drag them through the all-you-can-eat buffet line to get rid of the darn thing, either.

Dress warmly in cold weather

There’s reasons to do this, sure — you don’t want all your teeth to fall out from chattering because you decided to head out into single-digit temperatures in just a Speedo (actually, you probably don’t want to do that even in warm weather) — but fear of catching a cold is not one of them. Despite both the illness’ name and conventional wisdom, one catches a cold through acquiring a viral infection. You might get hypothermia from joining the Polar Bear Club, but not a cold.

On the other hand, when the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre famously wrote in “No Exit” that “Hell is other people,” he might have been talking about the cold. During cold weather, people tend to stay indoors more — which helps germs spread more easily from person-to-person. So cold weather does play a role in catching the sickness by the same name — but not a direct role.

So is there any hope? Sure. Look at it this way: Of all man’s diseases and afflictions for which scientists have yet to develop a cure, the common cold is among the most harmless. It takes many years and many millions — or billions — of research dollars to develop even a single type of medicine — it’s far more important that we crack the secret to curing cancer or AIDS before relieving people of the sniffles and a sore throat.

Okay, maybe that’s not so much “hope” as just “perspective.” How about this? Misery loves company. There are lots and lots of people walking around out there with the cold — so if you’re sneezing and hacking, you’re not alone. And then there’s always the Great and Powerful Q ... which is followed by plenty of zzzzzzzzzzzz.

Cold medicine helps you get better

NyQuil is nice — A.K.A. “The Great and Powerful Q,” it tends to knock you out cold, helping you forget your cold-borne misery through unconsciousness. Some studies suggest that Vitamin C has an effect — but before you buy the store out of orange juice, its only a minimal relief — it might take a day off your cold. And antibiotics won’t kill off the cold virus — they only help if bacteria from a cold has resulted in another infection somewhere else in the body. There are a lot of medicines out there which help treat cold symptoms, but you’re going to be stuck with your cold for about a week or so either way. To stay with the theme of existentialism started with the Sartre reference, suffering is inevitable. Cheery, huh?

And hey — a bowl of chicken soup never hurt anybody.