What's on Your Mind

[Insertnamehere]

wondering why there is no cure for the common cold - because I have one ....and im not happy

1) Viruses in general cannot be eliminated without eliminating the cell that hosts them. Viruses are not living entities and will use your own cell and its production machinery to create more copies of themselves. Your immune system has several ways to get rid of them, but all of them involve destroying the infected cell (Natural Killer cells, cytotoxic CD8+ T lymphocytes, inteferon gamma, etc, which, naturally puts the organism under stress if the infections spreads considerably. External ways to handle viruses are limited to vaccination (applied immunity) and medications that inactivate their abilty to make more copies of themselves.

2) Common cold doesn't have one pathogenic agent but just about 200 different kinds of viruses that cause it. Trying to create a vaccine that works for every cold in the world is just not feasible.

3) Like HIV and Influenza, common cold viruses tend to be hypermutable, meaning they constantly change. That makes it really hard for your immune system to create memory against them and by default, it means that a vaccine is largely ineffective.

4) Unlike HIV or Influenza, common cold viruses create self-containable non lethal diseases with minor impact on your overall health. No one will be very interested in investing the amount of time and resources needed to produce a cure for something that at the end of the day is not going to kill you, especially when all the symptoms it creates can be treated with extremely common and cheap over-the-counter medications. That is why when you see an antiviral medication, it is very virus-specific.