What If We Cured the Common Cold? | Unveiled

What If We Cured the Common Cold?

Everybody gets sick, and more often than not the common cold is the culprit. It’s affected humans as long as we’ve been alive, and the average adult comes down with three colds a year. But to this day, we still haven’t found a way to beat this particular ailment.

This is Unveiled, and today we’re answering the extraordinary question; what if we cured the common cold?

While colds are simple inconveniences for most of us, for some more vulnerable people they can pose a more serious problem. Infants and the elderly, as well as people who are already sick or have immune system problems, are all at risk of greater complications or even death through things like pneumonia if they catch a cold. Regardless of how severely (or not) a cold affects us, though, few people would pass up the opportunity to take a pill and have it miraculously cured.

The main problem with the common cold is that there are at least 160 different serotypes, or strains, of rhinovirus - which is the most common of all the viruses that can cause the coughing, headaches, fatigue, congestion, and everything else we associate with a cold. In total, there are more than 200 viruses that can cause the condition. It’s known as the “common” cold for a reason! This is also why creating a vaccine against the cold is so difficult, however… because to make it effective it would have to work against literally hundreds of strains. We do have vaccines for the flu but that’s because there are only a limited number of influenza virus types, which makes it’s easier to develop a vaccination.

History shows us that it is possible to create vaccines that tackle numerous strains of the same virus though - it’s how the successful polio vaccine works - so there is some hope that the cold could one day be eliminated. But, an all-encompassing inoculation wouldn’t be the only method we could try. There has been some research into developing antivirals, drugs specifically designed to tackle viruses. The issue here, though, is that these are even harder to make than vaccines are; we currently have less than 100 antivirals at our disposal across the board, and none of them work against rhinoviruses. Other researchers have suggested that we look at the human body first, to develop a means of manipulating the proteins inside a host (or, indeed, inside a virus) to prevent that virus from multiplying and spreading. In this case, the “cure” would come from within ourselves. So, there are various attempts to find a universal solution, and some estimates suggest they might be successful within even the next decade.

But inventing the cure would only be one part of the puzzle; administering it effectively would be another issue. If we were to go down the antiviral route with our cure, we’d eventually have to deal with the virus becoming immune to the drugs. Antivirals work in much the same way as antibiotics do, and in recent years overuse of antibiotics has become a major problem. Antibiotics are no longer used to treat a range of infections, particularly those that will clear up on their own, because bacteria are becoming resistant to them.

The good thing about this is that if we did develop an antiviral for the cold, we now already know much more about antimicrobial resistance in advance… so we could take better precautions (such as not overprescribing the medication) to ensure that we don’t fall into the same traps… Or at least, that we don’t fall into them as quickly. Another plus for developing antivirals would be that in creating them we’d learn more about cold-causing rhinoviruses in general, which could better place us to reach a more stable cure in the future. Even so, if a drug to immediately cure the common cold did exist, it probably wouldn’t be readily available. As much as they suck, colds still aren’t fatal or even dangerous to the vast majority of people… so, rather than risk the prospect of drug-resistant viruses one day emerging, doctors would still be more likely to send you away without treatment, to wait for the cold to disappear on its own in about a week. In the event that we had different antivirals for different strains of rhinovirus, the situation might be slightly different - but cold cures would still be rarely dished out. In this case, it would be more a matter of time, since a doctor would first need to know which rhinovirus to treat you for… and by the time they’d worked that out, well, your cold could well have again cleared up naturally.

At the other end of the spectrum, what about a potential vaccine? We know it would be difficult to develop one, but not impossible. And if a vaccine did exist, then it really could spell the end for the common cold - from low-level runny noses up to potentially dangerous bouts of illness. A successful vaccine against all the known strains of cold, or at least the most common, could then trigger herd immunity to help prevent the spread of illness on a huge scale. We know that rhinoviruses are easily passed between humans, but this wouldn’t be a concern anymore... as long as enough people were vaccinated.

In recent times, vaccines have often proven to be our best weapon for fighting diseases. They’re most effective, though, only if the majority of people have them, which is one reason why the flu continually rears its head; many simply do not get their yearly flu shot. A vaccine against the common cold, then, would need to be administered to almost everybody; it could even wind up a mandatory procedure. The smallpox virus and the less deadly cowpox virus form perhaps the most famous vaccine success story. They were used as the basis for the first ever vaccine, smallpox was eradicated, and nowadays we don’t have to worry about it at all. In smallpox, the extremely high fatality rate was the main motivator toward finding a cure. Clearly, by contrast, the common cold has an extremely low fatality rate... But, if we could eradicate it, as well, we’d be ridding the global population of one of its leading, everyday health complaints.

That said, it’s hard to imagine that a movement to get everybody immunised against the common cold would have much success, especially when the worst most people suffer is having to spend a few days in bed. Ultimately, a cold vaccine would likely be expensive to produce and difficult to implement and - unless it was mandatory - it could have even less coverage than the flu vaccine currently does. But, on the other hand, the colds themselves don’t come cheap, either.

A 2002 National Institutes of Health study showed that colds cost the United States around $25 billion year on year, most of which comes from productivity loss thanks to employees missing work or attending while ill. That’s the equivalent of over $35 billion a year, in 2019. So, find a cure for the common cold, and it could actually make a lot of economic sense. The savings clawed back by workers not taking time off might even cover the cost of manufacturing whatever cold-beating medicine we opt for in the first place. Plus, with a universal cure in place, we’d no longer need to produce the various cold medicines of today, all of which only alleviate the symptoms - which is more money saved. Unless, of course, you work for a drug company… many of which would actually be operating at a loss in a world without the common cold. Were we to solve this particular health problem then it really could have a dramatic wider impact on society!

For now, the common cold isn’t a huge threat. Yes, some are more vulnerable to it than others and it can develop into more serious conditions, but for the most part “getting a cold” means feeling “not your best” for just a few days. If a cold cure did exist… then it might not necessarily be readily available, and it might not even be in our best interest to take it. Were a vaccination to be developed then it could take years for its effects to truly take hold. In day-to-day life, though, a world without colds would mostly mean a balance between two things; far less coughing and sneezing, but also far fewer sick days! And that’s what would happen if we cured the common cold.