Let me paint a picture for you, and tell me if you’ve asked the same question. Here goes:
You caught the cold. It was flu season. Predictable. But, it was also crucial meetings week at work, and you just can’t sit this one out. So you tell yourself that you’re just gonna have to suck it up and drink plenty of medicine for cough and colds to hasten the recovery. The next day, you come into the office, tissue in hand, nose red as a rose and sneezing here and there, but hey, you can attend the meetings – great!
2 days later, thanks to your meds you’re already better. Unfortunately, you passed your cold onto your friend at the office and he suddenly sneezes at your face (rude bloke!). So then you start wondering, “Wait, can I catch my friend’s cold which was originally my cold?”
Well, it’s great that you ask because in this article we’ll discuss whether or not it’s possible to catch the same cold. Here are some facts we’ll need to take into consideration:
1. There’s more than 1 kind of cold
There are more than 200 types of other viruses which any person could catch at any time of the year. What’s even more fascinating is that these viruses can combine and create more than 1,500 variations of colds. Scientists and doctors have yet to discover all the strains that viruses can produce, which is why some viruses take us by surprise. Take the MERS-CoV for example, it has researches on the alert, because the death toll in Saudi Arabia is currently at 115 out of 414 cases.
2. Your immune system – to the rescue!
A few days after you recover from your cold, your immune system starts to produce specific antibodies that fight that strain of the virus and prevent it from infecting more cells. In effect, it’s almost like a vaccine.
3. Are you sure you’re the one who passed the cold?
As stated in fact #1, there is more than one kind of cold. So can’t be sure if you were the one who passed the cold in the first place. Say you catch Cold A, then a few days later your friend catches Cold B. If you’re better from your Cold A, and your friend is still suffering from Cold B, there is a chance that you can get sick again, but this time from a different virus because it wasn't the virus you had in the first place.
Conclusion:
Technically, you can’t catch the same cold twice. When your body builds antibodies from a specific strain of virus, it’s likely that you won’t get sick from that strain again. And if you do, it’s going to be very mild and almost unnoticeable. You can however get sick from a different strain of virus. If you don’t boost your immune system with the help of some Vitamin C, it is likely that after you’ve recovered from a sickness that you can get infected again. So here’s some advice – drink lots of vitamin c and exercise frequently. Studies show that just by doing these two things, you are making yourself a fortress against common sicknesses like fever and colds.
