The common cold can be considered the most common illness in humans and the medical community always tells us the same thing: we can treat the symptoms but we don't have a cure and it's the immune system that ends up overcoming the illness.
What causes common colds?
It's caused by a virus, although this wouldn't exactly be so. What causes the infection is more like a group of viruses and sometimes they attack us all together or a small group of them. The most common of these is the rhinovirus, which is present in about 50% of common colds, depending on the area it can be between 30% and 80%.
Why is it so hard to cure?
The reason why it's so difficult to cure the common cold is because of the wide variety of viruses that come together to infect us. There are more than 100 varieties of rhinovirus alone, and they're continually mutating, the secret to defeating a pathogen is to be able to attach a "label" to its surface to identify it.
This week the scientific community has discovered a substance that is able to stop the common cold infection. This substance has been called IMP 1088 which doesn't beat all viruses but it does beat all rhinoviruses which are primarily responsible for the common cold.
The idea that led them to this discovery was based on the following reasoning: viruses are parasites of cells, they need them to reproduce itself and this makes them dependent on us and scientists have found a protein that virus needs to assemble itself correctly but that we don't need immediately, being able to deprive viruses of this protein for 24 hours we can get the common cold symptoms to disappear almost completely in the one day.
