If you’re raising your eyebrows in disbelief here’s the shockingly disconcerting revelation. For most of us the common cold virus caused by a horny sounding little bug called rhinovirus, not a residue of the animal, is a temporary disturbance. Some mild upper respiratory tract symptoms, a runny nose, some mucous production, possibly a fever, an irritating cough, even some fatigue, but we get over it in a short space of time and we’re back to our same old bubbly, effervescent selves. What I’ve been noticing lately are some alarming manifestations in the way some patients are managing this seemingly innocuous microbe.
Minor iterations of this illness have become major medical catastrophes, especially if asthma attacks are triggered and those who suffer from emphysema also known as chronic obstructive airways, becoming very sick and find that their lung function is severely compromised. Tragically these sorts of events can sometimes, although mercifully rarely, be fatal. While I’m happy to say that I’ve never witnessed one of these events in my practice what I am finding is that patients have become excessively unwell with severe bouts of incessant coughing producing copious amounts of mucous, sometimes leading to wheezing and breathlessness, with mounting fatigue and debilitating incapacity.
Here’s the problem with this train of events. If the mucous becomes coloured there’s the customary notion that this signifies a bacterial infection immediately necessitating the introduction of antibiotics. For the most part this interpretation is not correct. Mucous that is coloured yellow or green is merely an indication that the immune system is fighting a germ, highly likely a virus, not a bacterium. We don’t engage antibiotics to eliminate bacteria. Swabs, blood tests, sputum sampling the mucous that is produced and even chest X-rays, if needed, will usually identify the underlying cause of the illness. If it is a bacterium, by all means antibiotics might be necessary, but if it’s not and we deploy antibiotics inappropriately then we are setting ourselves up for the development of what is about to become and in fact already is a major threat to providing effective treatments for the severely unwell and even for some of us with less threatening bacterially generated diseases, antibiotic resistance. I wrote ‘Immune Apocalypse’ https://eternalhealth.org/e_books/immune-apocalypse/ to address this escalating disaster, which is rapidly eclipsing any pandemic in waiting as a principal menace to our survival as a species.
There’s an added problematic caveat with this. When a virus or any invading microbe attempts to set up a base camp in our bodies our immune systems are immediately mobilised to repel this incursion. Some of the resistance fighters that are mobilised are inflammatory molecules and these are the players that make us feel so unwell in their frenzied attempts to rid our bodies of this hostile enemy. When we ingest antibiotics we are hosing down this incendiary battle and we feel much better once the embers are smouldering and the heated confrontation has been temporarily quelled. I’ve had patients remarking that their child was so much better once they commenced antibiotics but this reprieve might only be temporary and once symptoms resurface there might be the request for a repeat prescription. Viruses can take a while to completely exit our bodies but the solution to feeling temporarily ill is not to take antibiotics, often the refuge for those who want to feel better immediately and frequently do because of this inflammation dousing effect, not because a bacterium is making them sick. The fall-out from this inopportune practice is already starting to ripple through our medical world and the ultimate after-shocks are going to be seismic as the earthquake that is antibiotic resistance erupts.
Here’s how the rhinovirus saga has evolved. When we initially encounter a virus a lot of us manufacture a major immune operative called interferon which alerts other immune cells to mobilise their antiviral defences which prevents the virus from spreading. If this first line defence Is not efficiently initiated the virus is able to metastasise rapidly leading to the production of inflammatory chemicals and the rage of distressing symptoms that are features of this infestation. For various reasons a lot of us appear to have weakened immune systems, possibly connected with the downside of alcohol consumption, vaping, passive exposure to cigarette smoke, environmental pollution, stress and poor sleep to name some of the plausible culprits for this worrying trend.
Medical sciences solution for this frightening predicament is to consider formulating a vaccine to nuke this virus or even better a universal vaccine that could neutralise all viruses with one insertion of a needle, an ongoing pipedream for those who postulate that vaccination is the sovereign remedy for all adversarial microorganisms. It might be less costly and possibly more effective to invest in fortifying our immune systems with healthy dietary practices and bring into play natural substances like vitamin C, zinc, echinacea and probiotics which I’ve advanced in ‘Immune Apocalypse’ https://eternalhealth.org/e_books/immune-apocalypse/ as the most advantageous strategy for terminating the march of the microbes.
