crumpets
Posts: 1614
Joined: 11/5/2014 From: South Bay (SF & Silicon Valley) Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Cinnamongirl67 Oh no I must sue my nursing school for teaching wrong information! When you google it it says the same thing. It does talk about humidity as a contributing factor too. Did I lose my star crumpets? You and UllrsIshtar both get to keep the red star! You and I were both taught that you can't catch a "cold" (insert whatever infectious disease you want there) by being cold, which, of course, must be true in the sense that if there is no infectious particle, then simply being cold isn't going to spontaneously generate the organism (although one could argue that an existing organism in your body can infect you - nobody is arguing that scenario). That people get "colds" (insert whatever) more so in the winter months in the northern hemisphere is clear (witness the "flu season"); so the question has always been how that happens. Dumb people just "assume" it's because they're cold - and that's as deeply as they go. Plenty of people are that dumb. It seems that perhaps 95% of the population is that dumb in fact. So, there will be plenty of misinformation on this topic - because it's one that dumb people just assume they know the answer to. Of course, you and I were taught the studies run by, as I recall, the military (who certainly CARES a lot about this issue), who determined that the cold itself wasn't what determined whether their test subjects got a cold or not. With each study in mind, subsequent studies can narrow down the factors. Looking at the four resources that UllrsIshtar found, I would categorize 3 of them as pretty convincing that there is more to the story, and of those three, the first two of them I'd say clearly have relevance in the real world (based on their analysis of real world conditions). (The third was in vitro only.) Even though those first two studies appear, from their language, to be formal scientific studies, I don't think there can be an certain conclusions yet, but the authors of those first two studies did make a convincing argument that HUMIDITY plays a role. However, the first study, which was perhaps the least confusing, didn't prove (to me) that being indoors DID NOT cause the higher incidence of the flu that they surveyed (so, for me, they simply left open a valid question of whether it was the fact people were indoors or the fact that the air was cold and dry). Of course, UllrsIshtar makes a valid point that schoolchildren probably are indoors in September and May just as much as they are in December and February, so, there does seem to be room for the "indoors" theory to be expanded upon by the addition of thermal and meteorological conditions. But, there were confusions, as are found in ALL scientific studies. for example, if we accept HUMIDITY as a key factor, it becomes somewhat confusing that both the dry and moist air had somewhat the same effects, but the authors of that second study didn't describe them the way that would have been easy to interpret. Here's what I would have expected them to categorize the hemispheric conditions as: 1. cold, dry 2. warm, wet But, instead, they categorized them as: 1. cold dry 2. humid rainy The fact the second study never used the terms I would have expected is partly confusing to me because humid and rainy are basically the same thing, while cold and dry are different - so one has to wonder what they really found since they really only found: 1. cold, dry 2. wet Which is harder to make sense out of. Like all studies, each paper is a small step forward, which is to say that maybe the answer isn't as simple as "people are indoors". The answer may be "people are indoors and the virus has a better chance of infecting us".
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