Why are you more likely to catch flu when it's cold? I.e winter as opposed to the summer.
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Anonymous2009-08-12 14:42
It's because your body spends more energy keeping warm against the cold leaving you with less energy later which lets micro organisms attack and your immune system is in a weakened state so it succumbs more easily to disease than if it were warmer. But according to Wikipedia it's really because people stay indoors when it's winter so you tend to be around more people who have colds and that's why you get them when it's cold. Fuck Wikipedia.
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pork soda2009-08-12 14:49
Because people sit in drafts and go outside with wet hair.
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Anonymous2009-08-12 17:34
>>2
Proof plz. I admit I'm not really qualified for and in-depth discussion of biology. But your reasoning sounds a little flawed. Are people who do strenuous exercise more susceptible to colds also? Their bodies are spending even more energy.
""Although common colds are seasonal, with more occurring during winter, experiments so far have failed to produce evidence that short-term exposure to cold weather or direct chilling increases susceptibility to infection, implying that the seasonal variation is instead due to a change in behaviors such as increased time spent indoors at close proximity to others.[6][10][11][12][13]""
>>1
I have a hunch that it's largely psychosomatic.
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Anonymous2009-08-13 14:45
You know when you stay up too late and you're tired and your body needs rest and you take coffee and it makes you more tired until you feel weak and shiver and then you go to work for eight hours without sleeping and go back and forth between the freezer to get the pizza dough and back to room temperature and your body is like fuck you what is this well it's reasonable to say it increases the likelihood of your immune system not defending from pathogens as optimally as it could.
Of course you have to be exposed to an organism first, no one is saying the weather itself causes the cold. If they ran tests they would have to expose people to the virus either way, and each person's immune system is slightly different in its ability to handle pathogens, so finding any accuracy in these tests would require a very large sample and would still have a high margin of error and probably be inhumane in the administration of pathogens directly to people who would be pissed off regardless.
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Anonymous2009-08-13 21:18
???
i don't.
then again, during the winter, i am in (direct) contact with fewer people.
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Anonymous2009-08-14 4:09
>>1 >>7
Cold makes your body close up more (vasocontrictions, runny nose, that sort of thing, it tries to keep body temperature central) because of this you essentially have more mucus, the spread of this mucus is what helps to spread influenza, and as anon said I too feel a large part of it is psychosomatic.
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Anonymous2009-08-14 4:45
psychosomatic
You mean it's all in the mind and flu is equally prevalent in both seasons?
to be fair, the middle east also contains parts of North Africa, Central Asia, small bits of the Mediterranean, Iran (Persia) and Turkey (Anatolia), and Pakistan (South Asia), also of which also have some cold season and different geographies and such.
I think you guys mean Arabia?