Things I Like - Sciences

That's it. The nasty little virus that had me blowing my nose and hacking my lungs out for two weeks last month (I blew it up the way it blew my head up). I caught the rhinovirus on a flight to Baltimore - I know this for a fact because I was fine when I left Chicago that morning but had a headache and a scratchy throat a couple hours after getting off the plane.

There's nothing you can do when you have a cold other than take things to make you feel less awful - I'm a big fan of Nyquil (day and night) along with throat lozenges and lots of hot tea. Gramma used to drink tea with a shot of whiskey...

Regardless of what I take, the heavy part of the cold lasts for about a week with sniffles and a cough hanging on for up to two weeks longer. Wouldn't it be nice if you could take a pill that would wipe it out as soon as you first felt the little bugger?

Help may be on the way. As reported on the website Science Centric, a multi-institutional team of researchers has sequenced all 99 known strains of the cold virus.

Conducted by teams at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the J. Craig Venter Institute, the work to sequence and analyze the cold virus genomes lays a foundation for understanding the virus, its evolution and three-dimensional structure and, most importantly, for exposing vulnerabilities that could lead to the first effective cold remedies.

In the case of the cold virus...the sequenced genomes are showing which receptors on cells the viruses bind to, information that can be used to design drugs that could potentially help prevent or mediate infection as viruses require access to host cells to do their dirty work and make new viruses.
~Science Centric

It might not be a cure for cancer but getting rid of the common cold would brighten a lot of lives.