Latest news with #commoncold
Medscape
4 days ago
- Health
- Medscape
Common Cold Virus Infections Drop After SARS-CoV-2 Exposure
TOPLINE: Detection of common cold coronaviruses (ccCoVs) decreased by approximately half after the widespread SARS-CoV-2 exposure and COVID-19 vaccination, whereas detection of respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and influenza virus remained largely unchanged. METHODOLOGY: As ccCoVs share genetic and antigenic features with SARS-CoV-2, widespread exposure to SARS-CoV-2 (through infection and vaccination) might affect ccCoV circulation. Researchers conducted a single-center retrospective study at Boston Medical Center comparing the incidence of ccCoV, RSV, and influenza virus infections before the COVID-19 pandemic and after the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron surge and widespread vaccination. The data collected encompassed five pre-COVID-19 seasons (October 2015 to March 2020), designated as period 1, and two post-widespread Omicron infection and COVID-19 vaccination seasons (October 2022 to April 2024), designated as period 2. Test positivity was evaluated while accounting for age, biological sex at birth, and level of hospitalization. TAKEAWAY: Weekly ccCoV detection decreased by approximately 50% in period 2 vs period 1 (intercept, 12.35; β, -5.87; P < .0001), while RSV (intercept, 14.55; β, 4.34; P = .08) and influenza virus (intercept, 41.86; β = 2.83; P = .73) showed no significant decrease. After adjusting for age, sex, and level of medical care, the odds of detecting ccCoV were > 50% lower in period 2 than in period 1, whereas the odds of detecting RSV were approximately 25% higher. Individuals younger than 18 years had significantly higher ccCoV and RSV infections but not those older than 65 years. higher ccCoV and RSV infections but not those older than 65 years. Biological sex at birth was not associated with the incidence of either ccCoV or RSV disease. IN PRACTICE: 'Our current work demonstrates changes in ccCoV epidemiology in the city of Boston after nearly ubiquitous exposure to SARS-CoV-2 antigens from infection and COVID-19 vaccination,' the authors wrote. 'SARS-CoV-2 infection potentially provides this heterotypic immunity, we cannot discount the effect of COVID-19 vaccination in this investigation,' they added. SOURCE: The study was led by Trisha Parayil, Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine, Boston. It was published online on June 18, 2025, in Open Forum Infectious Diseases. LIMITATIONS: The study showed associations but did not prove causation. The findings need to be validated from health centers beyond Boston to establish generalizability. Ongoing CoV evolution and waning SARS-CoV-2 immunity may alter these associations in the future. DISCLOSURES: This study was supported by the Massachusetts Consortium for Pathogen Readiness. The authors reported having no relevant conflicts of interest. This article was created using several editorial tools, including AI, as part of the process. Human editors reviewed this content before publication.
ABC News
26-06-2025
- Health
- ABC News
How to limit the spread of COVID, cold and flu at home in winter
Winter can be a contagious time of year for everything from COVID-19 to the common cold. Once someone in your household feels the first ominous tickle at the back of their throat, everyone else can feel doomed to follow. "It's always a challenge within households because we know households are the place where viruses like respiratory viruses spread really efficiently," says Catherine Bennett, Deakin University's chair of epidemiology. But there are ways to limit the risk of illnesses spreading from one family member or housemate to another, she says. Professor Bennett says if someone within your household becomes sick, it is possible you have already been exposed before they had any symptoms. However, if the sick person can isolate from the rest of household it's still worth it, she says. Ideally this would look like using a separate bedroom and bathroom to others. She says this degree of isolation is not possible or realistic for many households. Isolation can also look like someone sleeping on the couch to "reduce their risk of inhaling the virus" from their unwell partner overnight, she says. Medical director for government-funded online public health information service Healthdirect Darran Foo says if possible, the symptomatic person should remain isolated from the rest of the household until they no longer have active symptoms. For example, "no more ongoing fevers, no more coughing up lots of phlegm". If someone in the household is symptomatic, and isolating completely is not possible, Professor Bennett says a mask can help protect the rest of the household. "Wearing a mask if you're unwell can reduce your risk of passing it on to other people." Dr Foo also advises wearing a mask if it's possible and practical, particularly if you live in a smaller home like an apartment. Dr Foo recommends throwing used tissues away immediately and avoiding sharing cups, plates and cutlery in the household when someone is unwell, whether from a cold or COVID-19. "The biggest thing really is to maintain good hygiene, especially good hand hygiene," Dr Foo says. "Lots of hand washing and using sanitisers as much as possible." Professor Benett also says you should "wash your own hands more often in between touching things, even around the home" when you or someone else is sick. She recommends wiping down commonly used surfaces — such as the bathroom — more often. Any surfaces where someone has coughed may have droplets over them, she says. Professor Bennett says "bugs do so well [in winter because] we can't air our houses out". Poor ventilation will make it easier for viruses to spread, but she says increasing air turnover and introducing outdoor air can help. Open doors and windows when you can "so it's not the same air pushing right through the household that's around the person who's unwell." Dr Foo also says the more ventilation you can get at home the better, while of course avoiding hypothermia. Dr Foo says "the general advice all remains the same" if someone in the household is potentially more vulnerable. However, he says people more at risk of becoming seriously unwell may want to consult their regular healthcare professional who knows their medical history. "It really depends on that person's risk, their comorbidities and what ongoing conditions they have — and also to identify whether it's appropriate to use antiviral medication at that point in time." Professor Bennett says being diligent with mask wearing, hand washing and sanitising surfaces is particularly worth doing if someone in the house is vulnerable. Professor Bennett says being up to date with COVID-19 and influenza vaccinations will offer another layer of protection. "If you can't avoid infection in the household — and that's the hardest place to do it — then actually having some protection from severe illness is really important in influenza." In larger shared households there are more people to bring viruses home and that extra protection from vaccination is even more important, "particularly from severe illness in the vulnerable people in our households", Professor Bennett says. Dr Foo also encourages people to stay up to date with their vaccinations, "especially their annual flu vaccination and their COVID booster shots". This is general information only. For personal advice, you should see a qualified medical practitioner.
Medscape
23-06-2025
- Health
- Medscape
Vitamin C Does Nothing for the Common Cold
This transcript has been edited for clarity. If you aren't a 19th century British sailor, then you need to watch this video because — spoiler alert — vitamin C won't keep you from getting sick. I'm Dr Christopher Labos for Medscape, and this is On Second Thought . If you were blockading the continent during the Napoleonic Wars, then squirting some lemon juice into your beer probably made the difference between your teeth falling out and your teeth not falling out. There were a lot of ways to die if you were a British sailor during the Napoleonic Wars and, amazingly, French guns were not in the top three! The discovery of how to prevent scurvy with vitamin C is a great medical detective story, and I highly recommend Stephen Bown's book, Scurvy: How a Surgeon, a Mariner, and a Gentleman Solved the Greatest Medical Mystery of the Age of Sail . But if your idea of sailing is taking the IKEA ferry — by the way, it's free and gives you a great view of the Statue of Liberty — then scurvy is probably not your biggest problem. You probably take vitamin C because someone told you it prevents the common cold, and that person was probably Linus Pauling. Now, Linus Pauling was a very smart guy. He won two unrelated Nobel Prizes and, as far as I know, I haven't won any. So, when he wrote a book called Vitamin C and the Common Cold , people listened. And for some reason they don't seem to listen to me… Please follow me on X or Bluesky; social media is how I measure my self-worth. In the book, he told people to take 3000 mg of vitamin C every day to live longer and healthier. He predicted vitamin C would eliminate the common cold and extend the human lifespan. In interviews, he claimed that people who took optimum amounts of vitamins and supplements would live 25-35 years longer and would be free of diseases. Now, clearly the work of Nobel laureates needs to be taken seriously. But there is a condition called "Nobel disease" where, basically, you win a Nobel Prize and you think you're an expert in everything, and then subsequently go a little bit crazy and believe all kinds of nutty stuff. For example, Charles Richet won the 1913 Nobel Prize in Medicine and he believed in ghosts and telepathy; Pierre Curie attended seances; and a surprisingly large number of Nobel laureates became eugenicists. And then there was Kary Mullis, inventor of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR). Well, if you didn't know about that one, Google "Kary Mullis and fluorescent talking raccoon." You heard me: fluorescent talking raccoon. I'll wait here. Now, Linus Pauling was not any of these things, although he did say people with sickle cell trait should get a tattoo on their forehead so nobody accidentally had babies with them. And he also said some stuff about aborting babies with sickle cell disease. So… eugenics light, maybe? But to be fair, a lot of people in the 1930s held similar views, and it's unclear how much the general public in the US really knew about what was going on in Germany. But... This was in 1968?! Jesus! Okay, never mind about that. So anyway, being a Nobel laureate doesn't make everything you say inherently right. Let's do some math. Does vitamin C prevent the common cold? Because we aren't doing the cancer stuff; I get too much hate mail as it is. Okay, fine: Vitamin C doesn't treat cancer. There! I said it! Alright? Everybody happy? I said it! But let's do the cold and flu stuff because there's an important lesson here. Does vitamin C prevent the common cold? To answer this question, I'm going to be using the data from the 2013 Cochrane review titled "Vitamin C for Preventing and Treating the Common Cold." It summarized 29 trials, including 11,306 participants, and is one of the most misquoted Cochrane reviews I have ever seen. Let's start with treatment. Does taking vitamin C when you get sick make you better? No . There were 10 studies that looked at this question, and these were people taking vitamin C when their symptoms started. It made no difference in symptom duration or severity. If you start taking vitamin C at the onset of symptoms, it does nothing. So, if you're somebody who starts popping vitamin C tablets when you get sick, this Cochrane review does not support that practice. The commercials and celebrity endorsements are lying to you. The only reason the marketing geniuses behind vitamin C can say anything positive is because there's another way to take vitamin C — and no, I don't mean as a suppository. You can take it as a regular supplement every day of your life, which is great for capitalism but inconvenient for you as a healthcare user. So then the question becomes, if you take vitamin C every day of your life as a regular supplementation strategy, will that prevent you from getting sick? Also no . The incidence of common colds is not reduced in the general population with regular vitamin C supplementation. It says that very clearly in the review. The only benefit observed in the 2013 review was vitamin C's effect on symptom duration. If you take vitamin C every day of your life, when you get sick — and you will still get sick the same number of times —your symptoms will go away faster. How much faster, you ask? I'm glad you did. According to this analysis, it reduces cold symptom duration by 7.7% on average. And what does that mean? Well, let's assume your cold lasts for 5 days. That is 120 hours for those of us living on planet Earth. If we take the vitamin C meta-analysis at face value, your cold will go away 9 hours faster. You're spending $30 a month (or $360 a year) for 9 hours of symptom relief. I'm not sure that's cost-effective. So, if that's the case, why do people claim that vitamin C can prevent the common cold? Well, welcome to the wonderful world of subgroup analysis — it's kind of nuts here! If you limit the Cochrane review to the five studies that tested vitamin C in periods of short-term physical stress or cold temperatures, that's where you see a benefit. Let's break that down. Three studies tested the effect of vitamin C among ultramarathon runners in South Africa, so that was the short-term physical stress part — because running a marathon is bad enough, but running an ultramarathon is incrementally worse. The cold temperatures (which made up the bulk of this subgroup) were examined in two studies. The first study observed Canadian soldiers on military maneuvers, because, as you know, Canada's a freezing wasteland and I ride my moose to work every day at my igloo medical clinic. The other study (which is where the bulk of the cold temperature patients came from) involved skiers. You might think, Okay, these were Olympic skiers enduring high-stress and cold-weather environments . But surprisingly, no. It was a study of children attending a ski school in Switzerland, which actually sounds like a pretty good vacation and I assume cocoa was involved. What's often left out of this discussion is the fact that other, longer-duration studies, like one in US Marines and another one in kids attending swim schools, didn't show a benefit . So, you really have to pick and choose to see a signal here. In the general population, there's no benefit — only in this very eclectic and specific subgroup of patients. If you know something about statistics, you know how dangerous subgroup analysis can be. Cut up the data into ever thinner salami slices and you can find some wild and ludicrous results. Remember the ISIS-2 trial? It showed that aspirin efficacy post-myocardial infarction varied by astrological sign. That's the quintessential example of how multiple-hypothesis testing can generate spurious results. Random chance is a major factor in life. Random chance is why you can use real data to show that the divorce rate in the UK correlates with the number of movies that Disney has released in any given year. Go data dredging and you can find any association if you torture the data enough. Overall, vitamin C does nothing for the common cold. Even at the most forgiving, it shortens symptoms by a few hours, which I think is just spurious given the incredible heterogeneity in the published research. But if you ignore all that, you only see a clinically meaningful difference if you're a South African ultramarathoner, a Canadian soldier, or a child attending a ski school in Switzerland. And you're probably none of those things — just like you're not a 19th century British sailor.
ABC News
16-06-2025
- Climate
- ABC News
You'll catch your death! Does cold weather cause colds?
There tend to be more bugs around in winter making everyone snotty and uncomfortable. But does this mean that cold weather causes colds? Well no, viruses cause the common cold. But, as Norman and Tegan explain, winter does set the stage for those viruses to have more moments in the spotlight. References: If you enjoyed this episode, check these out!
The Independent
06-05-2025
- Health
- The Independent
Why you should never take antibiotics to treat a cold
Pharmacists report frequent pressure from patients to prescribe antibiotics for common colds, which are viral infections not treatable with antibiotics. Taking antibiotics for colds won't provide relief and contributes to antibiotic resistance, making future bacterial infections harder to treat. Cold symptoms can mimic bacterial infections, but duration and severity are key differentiators. Colds typically resolve in seven-10 days. Unnecessary antibiotic use risks developing antibiotic resistance, leading to more severe, difficult-to-treat infections. Other side effects include gastrointestinal issues, allergies, and microbiome disruption. Rest, hydration, over-the-counter symptom relief, and home remedies like warm fluids and humidifiers are recommended for cold recovery. Antibiotics are appropriate only for confirmed bacterial infections like pneumonia or strep throat.
