Cold viruses

Introduction

Especially when temperatures drop, a widespread wave of colds often occurs. Frequent freezing favors an infection with cold viruses. The spread of these viruses occurs through direct physical contact, e.g. when shaking hands, or through contact with the smallest droplets of the body fluids of sick people, which can easily happen when coughing or sneezing in public. But what exactly are these cold viruses, what types are there and above all – how can you protect yourself against them?

Definition

First of all, the terms “cold” and “cold viruses” must be considered more closely: A cold does not represent a diagnosis in the medical sense, as it is a fuzzily defined term. In general, a cold, in combination with a cough, and possibly an increased feeling of illness, is called a cold. This distinguishes a cold from bronchitis – an inflammatory process in the airways with fever and increased mucus formation – and pneumonia.

A cold is a very mild disease with few complications, while pneumonia has a mortality rate of 1-2% and higher. First of all, nobody has to die from a cold. Only when bacteria are added to the cold viruses can it become dangerous.

One then speaks of a so-called superinfection, which is characterized by a sudden and serious worsening of the course of the disease. The term “cold viruses” refers to a series of viruses that can potentially cause a cold. There are about 200 of them and they come from the most diverse virus families and subgroups.

The high variability of the pathogens is also the reason why we can get a viral cold so often: As soon as one virus has been successfully fought by our immune system, the next virus can in principle spread directly, if it works via a completely different mechanism of action and is therefore still completely foreign to the immune system at that time. The fact that we do not directly fall seriously ill or die from every viral infection shows that cold viruses are well adapted to the human body. The reason for this is that the viruses use the body as a host in order to multiply.

Badly adapted viruses destroy it quite quickly. Since the viruses of the common cold have been able to adapt to the human body over many centuries and millennia, “living together” with them is relatively painless – although naturally annoying. But it can also happen that we are constantly plagued by colds for months without ever being seriously ill. However, our immune system is weakened at this moment, as it has to deal with the cold viruses all the time and can allocate less time and resources to other, more dangerous pathogens. This topic might also be of interest to you: Virus infection