What is a cold?
Cold is one of the most common illnesses throughout the year and is also called "cold syndrome" or "cold".
Cold symptoms usually recover in about a week, but prolonged symptoms can cause serious complications such as pneumonia.
Therefore, it is important to take the cold medicine that suits your symptoms as soon as possible.


Cold is a familiar illness in daily life, but what kind of illness is it?
A cold is an acute inflammatory disease in the upper respiratory tract, such as the nasal cavity and pharynx, caused primarily by a viral infection.
Inflammation often extends beyond the local area to the entire airways.
When you catch a cold, you may experience symptoms such as sneezing, runny nose, stuffy nose, coughing, sputum, sore throat, and fever.
Influenza is also included in colds in a broad sense, but colds are caused by severe systemic symptoms such as high fever, headache, arthralgia, and malaise, which are easily aggravated, and are extremely infectious and cause a large-scale epidemic. It is taken as a distinction from.

80-90% of colds are caused by viruses.
In addition, there are non-infectious ones such as infection by bacteria including mycoplasma, allergies and cold.
The main viruses that cause colds include rhinovirus, coronavirus, influenza virus, parainfluenza virus, and adenovirus, and it is said that there are more than 200 types.
Rhinovirus infections are especially common, and most adult colds are due to this.

In addition, the symptoms of colds vary depending on the type of virus that infects.
"Nasal cold" with runny nose and stuffy nose is mainly caused by leprosy virus and coronavirus, and "throat cold" which is common in summer and causes pain and swelling in the throat is mainly caused by adenovirus. Will be.
However, with some exceptions such as influenza, it is difficult to identify the causative virus from the symptoms.
In addition, even if you can immunize against the infected virus, you will repeatedly catch colds because the immune effect does not continue and there are many variants of the virus.

> Transmission route and symptoms
There are three virus infection routes: contact infection, droplet infection, and air (droplet nucleus) infection.
Contact infections are transmitted through the mucous membranes of the mouth and nose through the hands.
Droplet infection is transmitted when another person inhales the virus contained in the droplets scattered by coughing or sneezing through the mouth or nose.
Airborne infections are transmitted by inhaling viruses in particles that are scattered over a wide area and are floating in the air.
In the case of colds, contact infections and droplet infections are the most common, with hand-borne contact infections being the most common.

If you are stressed or tired and weak, your resistance to the virus will decrease and you will be more likely to catch a cold.
Especially at the turn of the season, the temperature changes, which makes it even easier to pull.
Elderly people have weakened reflexes such as coughing and sputum excretion as well as resistance.
Be especially careful if you are bedridden or have a chronic chronic illness.
Children are more likely to come into contact with the virus through group life such as school, so be careful during the epidemic.

Cold symptoms generally have the following course:
When infected with the virus, after an incubation period of 1 to 3 days, the initial symptoms are discomfort in the nose and throat, and sneezing, runny nose, and sore throat appear.
Symptoms such as cough, sputum, fever and headache appear in the middle stage (3-4 days later), and systemic symptoms such as coughing and joint pain appear in the latter stage.