Colds are not caused by going outside without a coat.

Sorry, Mom. You meant well, but the only way to catch a cold or flu
is by picking up a virus. Going out into the cold without a jacket or a
hat, or with wet hair, does nothing to facilitate transmission. It’s
true, though, that we are more prone in the winter. Viruses are more
easily shared when people are clustered together indoors.

Flu vaccines do not cause flu.

The Centers For Disease Control and Prevention
are emphatic that you cannot get the flu from a flu shot. The vaccine
is made from killed or “inactivated” viruses, which can’t be
transmitted. However, you may experience a few side effects which mimic
the disease such as aches and a low-grade fever.

Feed a cold, starve a fever? Nah. Feed ’em both.

This
bit of armchair advice is probably repeated as often as it is jumbled.
But you wouldn’t want to starve either virus: At higher temperatures
the body produces more interferon, a protein that helps prevent virus
reproduction. “The body is like a furnace, and to create heat you need
calories,” says Dr. George Wootan, a family physician and author of
Take Care of Your Child’s Health. “When people have chills it is
because they don’t have enough calories to bring up the heat normally
…by feeding them, they will have enough calories to raise the
temperature, increase the interferon, and kill the bugs.” Wootan will
sometimes recommend to patients without a temperature that they promote
their own fever by getting into a hot tub or putting on warm clothes
and getting under the covers (drink lots of water, too, if you’re going
to try this method).

“[Some] might say that you should starve a
fever because you don’t want the fever to go higher,” he concludes,
“but the body isn’t dumb and won’t do damage that it can’t control.”

Viruses survive on surfaces.

You
don’t have to wait to be sneezed on to catch a cold or flu—you can pick
the virus up right from a counter top, keyboard, telephone or other
surface. Rhinoviruses, the family of germs responsible for most colds,
have been shown to survive on a surface (or “fomite,” in medical terms)
for several hours or even days. “The concentration of virus attenuates;
that is, the potency is less and less as time goes on. But you need
very few viral particles to trigger an infection,” explains Dr. Richard
Rosenfeld, professor and chairman of otolaryngology at Long Island
College Hospital in Brooklyn, N.Y. “Even if there’s just a little left
and you happen to touch that doorknob or coffee cup, the virus can then
survive on your hands for quite a long time. Then all it takes is a
little wipe or your nose or eyes and whatever little bit of virus on
there will go to town very quickly. It’s a very efficient multiplying
process.”

News: Mutant Respiratory Virus Has Claimed 10 Lives, says CDC

Colds that linger or worsen may indicate sinusitis.

Barring
an underlying condition or immune deficiency, most people can fight off
a cold inside of 10 days. When symptoms such as congestion, headache
and runny nose drag on, it may indicate a bacterial infection of the
sinuses, or sinusitis.
“Duration of a cold beyond 10 days is highly suggestive of bacterial
infection,” says Rosenfeld, who was the lead author of a new guideline
for treating adult sinusitis,
which addresses the importance of distinguishing a cold from sinusitis.
“The other feature suggesting sinusitis is the pattern of ‘double
worsening.’ That’s when someone starts to feel better and then all of a
sudden they get hit again, and they’re getting worse. Now bacterial
infection has superimposed itself on the viral illness. When you have
prolonged illness or the double-worsening pattern, it’s reasonable to
consider antibiotics.”

Vitamin C is ineffective for preventing or treating cold or flu.

A review of 30 studies
on vitamin C that was updated in May 2007 put to rest a few dozen
years’ of overconfidence in orange juice. “Vitamin C cannot effectively
prevent or cure common colds or flu in the majority of people,” says
Sari Greaves, registered dietician with New York-Presbyterian Hospital.
Greaves allows that some benefit has been shown for extreme athletes
exercising in extreme cold, but “since vitamin C is only known to offer
a biological benefit in certain cases and in a restricted number of
people, for the average adult, it’s not worth it to supplement.”

It’s true: we can put a man on the moon but we can’t cure the common cold.

The
problem is that there are hundreds of varieties, or serotypes, of
rhinovirus in addition to other viruses that cause the common cold. Of
those hundreds, just a few are causing widespread infection at any
point in time. The serotypes change so rapidly that they’re impossible
to keep up with. A vaccine would have to be specific to the current
serotype, and by the time the virus was identified and an antidote
developed, the active serotype would have changed. On the plus side,
we’ve been to the moon six times.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 29th, 2007 at 1:25 am and is filed under Health. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.