Common Cold And Flu Treatments, Symptoms Overview
  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 common cold and flu better known as influenza, 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. 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. This fact must never be down played as the question is constantly asked why is the influenza pandemic so important? |
Cold specialists also now know a great deal about how infections are transmitted: For example, you do, indeed, “catch” a major share of the common colds you suffer— with your hands. By touching droplets of virus-laden mucus either on the body of a carrier 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 conveniently 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. The seasons affect the occurrence and it is mostly around winter mothers ask what is good for a child's runny nose and congestion.
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. This is why understanding the fact that even headaches related to influenza can lead to major health problems.
The growing body of knowledge about viruses and their interactions with your body may eventually lead to ways of preventing and curing the common cold, as this knowledge already has produced treatments for influenza and many serious complications of the flu. 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. One fact is clear is that you must stay away from food and drink that have a negative effect so doctors are still debating is ginger tea good for laryngitis.
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 crew showed the classic symptoms: stuffed-up noses, sore throats and cold-related fatigue.
NASA postponed the launch at an estimated cost of $500,000—the first time in 19 manned flights that astronaut illness, rather than bad weather or technical trouble, caused a lift-off to be delayed. The three men recovered enough to lift off on Monday, March 3—thus confirming the adage, treat a cold and it will end in seven days, do nothing and it will last a week. (Partly because other space crews were isolated from contamination before launch, none suffered a repetition of the expensive 1969 outbreak of the common cold.) Had these individuals had the technology now treatment would have been faster as we have come such a far way to be able to know how to treat a sore throat from allergies.
Apollo 9’s colds may well have been the most expensive in history, but the common cold must be ranked as a costly disease in its own right. The colds contracted by Americans alone result in an estimated 300 million days of lowered efficiency, 60 million days of lost school attendance and almost 50 million days lost on the job. Add to that the money spent on cold pills, the importance of cough syrups, nose drops, visits to the doctor and mountains of tissues, and colds cost Americans about five billion dollars a year. Not surprisingly, the British and the Dutch suffer comparable losses to the affliction. Influenza, of course, can be not only costly, but deadly; in 1918 and 1919 it caused a pandemic that spread far more rapidly than the Black Death of the Middle Ages. Many people in the past have complained about diarrhea after influenza. |
