Malone takes on the common cold

This week I’ve not been able to get out of bed. I’m not sure if it’s the cold or the amount of Night Nurse I’ve been taking. I don’t mind having a cold because I had a week off with a cold in January. I’ve got so used to having a cold, I missed it. I missed needing a roll of bog paper in my handbag wherever I went. I missed talking like a seven year old boy. I missed my nose colour matching my blusher. Sure I missed it. I missed it like a mother misses changing nappies – I didn’t.

What I would like is to not ever have a cold again. How come we can lower people’s HIV counts almost to zero but we can’t stop my nose running?

“I missed my nose colour matching my blusher”

I’m not a suspicious person (I am) but it seems to me there’s more money in research to cure other stuff than the common cold. Sure it’s not a deadly disease, but it causes suffering and it’s expensive to have one. I know it’s a virus and viral infections are harder to treat, but if the common cold virus is so hard to cure then surely it’s the world’s most virulent attacker? Never mind aliens and the depleting ozone layer, there should be armies of laboratories all over the world working on the cure. Maybe the Hadron Collider gang and the pye theorists should all down tools for a bit and pitch in for the cure for the common cold. Why don’t we all chip in a tenner and fund the research? I reckon the research would show that sleep, juice and soup are the quickest relief for symptoms and that isolation is the best way to stop it spreading.

In fact the only reason that colds are so prevalent is that most people will only take two days off work for a cold yet a nasopharyingitis or rhinopharyingitis infection (tell your boss you have that!) lasts on average six days. Research tells us that employees don’t want to take more days off work as it’s ‘just a cold’, don’t want to let colleagues down, are worried about job security or don’t want to ‘clock up’ sick days just for a cold.

I’m a mum, not a doctor but surely there would be less colds if everyone stayed at home in isolation like people do with chicken pox? So please, paint a black cross on your door and tell work you’ve got a cold and save me £100s this year in OJ, tissues and cold remedies. Save the nation 35 per cent loss in lost productivity… eventually. Sure, to start we’d get a lot of ‘today’s train has been cancelled due to the driver having a runny nose’ and ‘the FTSE index was closed today due to a major case of rhinopharyngitis’. But eventually, with less people catching the virus, we’d be at work more. So stay at home snotty!

Illustration: Jake McDonald www.shakeyillustrations.blogspot.com