Shouldn’t the common cold be extinct by now?
I just caught the cold the other day. Yes. Poor me. I took two days off - two fairly bad days as I had to endure watching Oprah Winfrey and all that day time crap that’s on TV. I wonder how many points my IQ has dropped within those couple of days?
But before I get into my whingeing mode, let me put forward this question -shouldn’t the common cold be extinct by now? But first, let me give you the whole situation.
The common cold, or also popularly known as the ‘flu’ (which is a misnomer) or ‘the sniffles’, is caused by viruses. In fact, around 200+ viruses are known to cause the common cold. Let’s just call it 200, just to make things easy.
These viruses enter our body, they multiply, our body responds, we get sick (or rather we feel the symptoms of the cold), and a combination of our deadly white blood cells and the superior defence of our new antibodies get rid of the virus. Usually within a week. Nothing new there - we all know this.
Furthermore, we also know that once we have an antibody for a particular virus, that virus cannot infect us anymore. That’s why we can only get chicken pox once in our lives.
The average human catches the cold approximately 1-3 times per year (some quote 2-4 times per year). Some people get it more often, some less. Children are particularly susceptible, with statistics as high as 6-8 contractions per year.
Also, mother’s breast milk is supposed to transfer some of the mother’s antibodies to her baby.
Do you see where I am heading?
If we take an average human that lives to say 80 years old. An average human that, in her (let’s call it a she) childhood years (say up to 12 years old), contracts cold fairly regularly, at say 4 times per year. Then, for the rest of her life, she contracts the cold at an adult average of say, 2 times per year. This would mean by the time she’s 25 years she would have contracted the cold… (where’s my calculator?).. umm… 74 times. That’s nearly a third of all common cold viruses. By this time, logic would have it that she is far less likely to contract a cold, in fact, around 1/3 less likely.
Suppose our dear friend who’s regularly sick has a child, and she passes half of her antibodies to her child. This child would now be immune for over 15% of all common cold viruses. If this child grew up and caught the cold regularly, and her body built antibodies which she passed on to her daughter, eventually we should all be immune from the common cold, yes?
Even if we couldn’t pass our antibodies from mother to child, by the age of 40 an average human should be immune to about 50% of all common cold viruses. If we think about this as a population, where each human would be immune to 50% of common cold viruses, but each human would be immune to different combinations of common cold viruses, then surely the viruses would have an impossible job of spreading? If this is the case, if viruses cannot find new targets or vectors for transmission, surely they would die out quickly? This is, after all, how we eradicated Smallpox in the 60s and 70s.
The answer, of course, is that these viruses evolve. Yes, evolve. Evolve into better and more powerful beings. For most of us, this concept is not hard to imagine, but for a small minority of religous people, this may be hard to stomach. People who live in the central United States for example. People who believe that the world was created with a snap of the fingers and a flick of the wrist of God. People who believe that this Creationist theory should be taught in science classes.
It is of course, ironic that a monologue on the common cold is turning into a one sided rant on the application of the Creationist theory into science classes. Ironic because both spread like diseases, and it seems, both cannot be completely eradicated.
But I shall hold my tongue here for once. If I got into trouble for slandering chopstick users, imagine if I started to attack religion. So, to end with something in-topic, I shall pose you, the reader, a question :
If viruses mutate, why can’t we catch chicken pox more than once?
