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FUN FACTS
Ten Surprising Facts
About The Common Cold
You can catch a cold through your eyes. When an infected person coughs or sneezes, they release tiny droplets into the air. If these droplets get on to your hands, you can pass them into your eyes by touching them.
The germs that cause a common cold can live for up to two days outside of the body.
Taking Vitamin C does not keep colds at bay.
There are around 200 types of virus that cause common colds.
Over the centuries and around the world, lizard soup, blood-letting, leeches, turnips, plum pickle and the familiar chicken soup have
all been used to treat colds.
Most grown-ups have two to four colds a year; children can easily get six to 10.
A single cold virus can have 16 million offspring within the course of a day.
The lower the humidity, the more moisture evaporates from sneeze and cough droplets, and the further the germs can travel. Dry air also dries out the mucous lining in our nasal passages, weakening an important protective barrier. Both of these contribute to the increase in colds during cold, dry weather.
While a person's breath can travel one meter per second,
droplets from a sneeze can travel at about 160 kilometres per hour.
The single best way to avoid getting a cold, aside from becoming a hermit, is to wash your hands. A lot. Use soap and wash them in water for 20 seconds. It's cheap and easy and more effective than alcohol-based hand sanitizers; but if you don't have soap and water, sanitizers will do the job too.
PAGE 16 INSIDE ACCESS | APRIL 2021 4TH EDITION