I’m just curious cuz if you get any other disease, chances are that you’d likely not get it again unless you’re forcing the issue (like if you get typhoid the first time and the next time you’re drinking dirty water on purpose). I’m pretty sure most of us have gotten sick by common cold like at least 10 times in our life. Yet our body hasn’t developed any immunity towards it? Why?
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it evolves to avoid immune detection
You do, you’re not immune to the mutated strain you get the next year and the next one and the next one. You aren’t getting the exact same cold every time, it keeps mutating
It always changes. There are also a lot of active variations depending on region so you can get it in your area, let’s say southern United States, then go to the upper pacific north west and get another variation that could affect you differently and you wouldn’t have immunity towards.
The cold virus adapts to us faster than we do to it.
Bacteria doesn’t change very much, and once you have had a type of bacteria, the body is capable of defending against that entire category of bacteria.
Viral is much more specific and short term. Immunity typically lasts for several months after the virus is gone from the body. New variants can reinfect the body even before the immunity to the old one is completely gone.
There are many types of virus that can produce short term illness.
You don’t catch the same cold twice really. The germs are just different enough your body doesn’t immediately recognize it
Because the ‘common cold’ isn’t really a thing. It’s a collection of similar symptoms that can be caused by any one of thousands of different viruses. They’re mostly of a type called rhinovirus, but there are others which also cause similar symptoms.
The reason we can’t become immune is because it’s a different virus or strain every time we get a cold. Your body is immune to the exact strains it has experienced before but not to any that it hasn’t.
This is also why every cold is a little bit different. Sometimes you get over it in a couple of days with only a bit of sniffling, sometimes it’s a full blown fever, cough, headache that lasts a week. It’s a different virus every time. If it’s similar to one you’ve had before, your immune system might respond a bit quicker.
Because it’s constantly evolving and is never the exact same virus twice.
You are immunocompromised to begin with
The common cold isn’t one virus but a collection of several hundred viruses that all give the same symptoms.
Theres about 240+ strains of rhinoviruses, that cause head colds and the common cold.
Every time you catch a cold, it’s a different virus. You’ve got immunity to all the viruses you’ve previously recovered from
This constant mutation of the cold virus is why there is no vaccine or “cure” (that, and because it’s usually not fatal, so it’s not a priority)
You get immune to one strain and you fight that one off what gets you sick is a new strain
You do, there are just hundreds of viruses that can cause the common cold.
There are thousands maybe millions of very common things that we are immune to; either because we learned to fight them off or the non-immune didn’t survive.
There are thousands of cold viruses out there. You don’t get the same cold over and over (unless you’re immunocompromised). It’s a different virus every time, but most of them cause similar symptoms.
All these answers are good. But as an old person, the one thing about getting older that doesn’t suck, is that you get colds/flu less often. You’ve had so many of them, that you actually have developed immunity to many of the common ones.
Because viruses like the flu mutate and evolve a lot and super fast. The flu you get from one person is likely different enough from the flu you get from the second person so you’re immune system doesn’t recognize it/can’t effectively fight against it
It has to do with the seasonal nature of the Earth in concert with human nature.
Every winter, when it gets colder, people move inside. The seasonal cold spreads better indoors, and since we’re more indoors during the cold, there is a greater chance to pick it up.
It appears to die down over the summer months because we are outdoors and sunlight has a tendency to kill it off. However, the other hemisphere of the Earth has a chance to allow a new version of it to incubate and mutate ever slightly, so we never really achieve heard immunity.
We saw flu rates dramatically plummet when people were isolating, flights were cancelled, and we temporarily disrupted the spread of it all together.