It’s that feeling again: dryness at the back of the throat, suddenly you start sneezing and before you know it (Oh No!) you’ve got another cold. But the question many of us ask is, where and how did we pick up the virus in the first place? Or to put it in more technical language:
What is the incubation period of the common cold

The truth is complicated. Or in other words, medical science hasn’t found all of the answers yet. What people have claimed for literally centuries however, is that we get a cold after a sudden chill. It may be after you’ve gone skinny dipping with your new girl friend (some hope!) and the sea was a bit colder than you at first bargained for. Or, more likely, you found yourself locked out in a snowstorm. Whatever the cause, you ended up shivering violently, and next morning you wake up with that all too familiar feeling of yet another cold coming on. It has to be said that research scientists have, until fairly recently, totally denied any connection between getting a chill and the common cold.

And it’s relatively recently, in fact, that a fascinating piece of research has shed light on how we get, and what is the incubation period of the common cold. What these scientists did is to subject some human guinea pigs to the experience of getting a chill. Now I won’t go into the gory details of how this was done, but suffice it to say that when this group was compared to another so called control group, that was not subjected to a chill, they in fact turned out to get more colds. In other words, a chill does after all help you to get a cold.

Well just what has all this to do with the question of what is the incubation period of the common cold? The answer is that this piece of research shows that while many of us may be in fact, incubating a cold, we don’t actually get one unless we get a chill as well. Apparently, the virus lodges in our mucus membrane in our nose, but may not actually go on to develop into a full-blown cold unless we get that chill.

The chill has a dampening effect on our immune system that would normally protect us. All this means that the incubation period remains unknown. After all, you could be harboring the cold virus for many weeks without knowing it. Only if you were careless enough to get caught out in that snowstorm would you know that you had been harboring the cold virus all along. It could have been days, weeks or even months ago when you picked it up. Or for that matter it might have been just a few minutes ago, when you were giving your new girlfriend a goodbye kiss!

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 24th, 2008 at 5:39 am and is filed under General, Health, Mens Health, Misc, Womens Health.