Fall and winter are traditionally boom times for respiratory viruses—a point well proven by this year’s confluence of influenza, RSV, and COVID-19. But why does cold weather typically translate to cold and flu season?
suggests another explanation can be found within our noses.
As the body’s gateway to the outside world, the human nose is equipped with defenses meant to stop invaders, such as viruses and bacteria, in their tracks. In 2018, researchers from Boston’s Northeastern University, Massachusetts Eye and Ear , and several other organizations described one of those shields inWhen the nose detects bacteria, they found, it releases a swarm of tiny fluid-filled sacs meant to attack and neutralize it.
“When you kick a hornet’s nest, the hornets swarm out and try to kill whatever the attacker is before it can attack the nest,” says co-author Dr. Benjamin Bleier, director of otolaryngology translational research at Massachusetts Eye and Ear. “That’s what the body’s doing.” In the new study, Bleier and his collaborators show that the nose deploys similar defenses against common respiratory viruses, including two rhinoviruses and a coronavirus . They also set out to answer another question: does cold weather dampen the effectiveness of the nose’s natural immune response?
Previous research suggests common respiratory viruses thrive at lower temperatures. In 2015, a research team from Yale University used mice to
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