Why is there no cure for the common cold? There is no cure for the common cold because it is a virus and because there are so many different forms of it.
The common cold is called the common cold because it is the most common of all the illnesses humans get. There is obviously no way of counting, but the average adult gets three colds a year, and the average child gets eight. That means there are billions of colds a year. Assuming that everybody who gets sick takes at least one day off work or school when they are sick, that is billions of hours a year lost because of the common cold. You would think that for an illness that affects so many people, we would have a cure by now. However, the common cold is not curable for several reasons.
The first reason is that the common cold is caused by a virus and not bacteria. We get a cold when a virus makes its way past our defenses and gets down to the lining of the nose, sinuses, throat, and windpipe. Often the virus will be stopped by our nostril hairs, or trapped in the mucus we produce, or killed by the saliva in our mouth. Sometimes, that is not enough, and the cold virus will get past those defenses and settle in to the linings of your upper respiratory tract, and start reproducing. The virus hijacks cells in the area and makes them produce proteins that it needs. It then uses these proteins to reproduce itself,f and the new virus leaves the cell, finds a new one, and continues to do the same thing. Viruses are not alive, and their only purpose is to reproduce. Your body detects the growing invaders and starts an immune system response, which is why you get a runny nose and a fever. If you have a bacterial infection, antibiotics can kill the bacteria (although, recently, more and more bacteria are becoming immune to them). A viral infection is harder to fight because the drugs have to be targeted at specific viruses, and the viruses are inside our own cells, which makes it very hard to target them.
The second reason is that there are far too many strains of the virus to be able to fight them all. There are over 200 strains of virus that cause the common cold. Antiviral drugs need to be targeted at a specific virus and it is not easy to work out which virus has caused the cold. Viruses also evolve much faster than bacteria, and a drug that might have worked in the recent past may no longer be able to kill the virus. Viruses are basically evolution machines because the only purpose of the virus is to reproduce itself, and the only viruses that can reproduce themselves are the ones that survive. They mutate and evolve extremely quickly.
The third reason that people just don’t get sick enough for a cure to be necessary. In almost all cases, our bodies will be able to overcome the cold virus in a few days. It might take up to two weeks in the worst cases, but even then, if people are relatively healthy, our immune system is more than enough to deal with the cold virus. That means that the vast majority of people who get sick don’t seek medical treatment because they know from experience that they’ll feel bad for a couple of days and then they’ll feel fine. If the cold made people feel worse for longer, there might be some push for a cure. Viruses like the influenza virus and the coronavirus make people feel worse for longer, so more people seek medical treatment, which led to the creation of a vaccine. If one of the common cold viruses evolves to the point where it makes us really sick, things might be different. However, the common cold has evolved to make us just sick enough. The virus’s only goal is to reproduce and spread itself to another host. To do that, it needs us to have a runny nose and to cough. It also needs us to be moving around and to be alive. Any virus that kills its host or makes its host too sick to move around so it can spread is self-defeating.
Can you be immune to the common cold? You can’t be immune but some people do get more colds than others. That comes down to genetics, the state of the immune system, general health, levels of stress, and lack of sleep, among other things. However, even these superhuman people still get colds. They might just be faster at killing the virus or better at dealing with the symptoms. And this is what I learned today.
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Sources
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/12342-common-cold
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_cold
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseases/common-cold
https://cen.acs.org/pharmaceuticals/drug-discovery/Agent-stops-common-cold-virus/96/i21
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/treatments/antivirals
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/jan/24/secrets-of-people-who-never-get-sick
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-03-dont-immune-colds.html
Photo by Andrea Piacquadio: https://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-lying-on-bed-while-blowing-her-nose-3807629/