A Planet of Viruses summary

The common cold is a relatively harmless, but rather annoying sickness we’re all forced to deal with now and again. Our parents had it, our great-grandparents had it, and even our most ancient ancestors had to deal with fevers, coughs and runny noses.

The common cold is typically caused by the rhinovirus, a virus that was a nuisance to the Ancient Egyptians too. In the 3,500-year-old medical text Ebers Papyrus, an Egyptian scholar documents the symptoms of “resh,” including a persistent cough and excess mucus in the nose. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

While the symptoms of the common cold in ancient times match what we see today, methods of treatment have changed considerably. Egyptians were given a rather sensible prescription of herbs, incense and honey to apply around the nose, whereas the Romans were convinced that rubbing a mouse around their nose was the best way to defeat the sniffles!

History also provides us with a range of wildly different explanations for the common cold. Ancient Greeks chalked it up to an imbalance of the four bodily fluids, i.e., blood, yellow bile, black bile and phlegm. Seems rather unbelievable now, but the common cold’s cause eluded physicians even up to 1900, when physiologist Leonard Hill posited that colds were caused by moving from hot air to cold air, the way you might do when taking a morning walk.

Fortunately, scientific research from the early to mid-twentieth century helped uncover the true cause of the common cold. We now know that the rhinovirus is responsible. So do we know how to defeat it?

Despite centuries of experimenting with different remedies for the common cold, we still lack a fool-proof cure. The answer may lie in attacking the genetic code of the virus. But it’s worth asking whether we should bother finding a cure in the first place. After all, the rhinovirus and other harmless viruses teach our immune systems to react appropriately to benign infections, making it better able to deal with viruses that are serious threats to our health.

What are these deadly viruses? That’s what we’ll find out in the next blink.