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Comment by andreygrehov | Hacker News Reader

I'm at home for the past few days with a barely breathing nose, a sore throat and a headache. Humanity is about to get people travel around the Moon, we have self-driving cars and AI, but FFS(!), can someone create a pill that would kill a common cold/allergies? It drives me nuts that we don't have a solution for such a popular problem. I think I tried everything, but the recovery time is always around 7 days no matter what you do.

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Incidentally, I just wrote another (pretty long) reply mentioning just that. Based on my own very unusual medical history I suspect that maybe you should not want that. Of course I know nothing for sure at all, it's just that observing my own healing process I was pretty much force to conclude that at least sometimes there may be more to a cold than just "a cold", that it may (can sometimes) have an effect that is not just "I happened to be sick for a week", that it actually does something. Even if my own very personal reasons and thoughts turn out to be wrong, what about training of the immune system ("training" is not a good word because what does it even mean, but there must be some feedback effect, surely)? I snot having any little issues at all for decades really good? I think there are endless feedback loops and it's all a lot more mixed and complex. I would be skeptical that such a magic pill would be net positive.

Yea, while I wish I a had magic pill, I have thought the exact same thoughts just earlier today. But anyways, shoot me a message if you find that pill by any chance ;)

The wonders of evolution (of the cold virus, that is). I'm not sure we'll ever beat it.

Randall Munroe actually did a small section on eradicating the common cold in his What-if book, the basic idea is if that all of humanity stayed away from each other for a week or two then the common cold would die out as it can't survive outside of the human body for more than a week and normally survives by continuously hopping from host to host.

You'd need to provide water for humanity for this period somehow. Water supplies have to be sterile and available. (That is assuming everyone goes on a week long secluded water fast. It's harder if not everyone can fast. There's a problem with keeping people in care but not insoluble.)

That is just for rhinoviruses too, there are other viral reasons of common cold, more hardy than this, and bacterial diseases that mimic it very precisely.

Ha, that's awesome. I think I know why Elon Musk wants to colonize Mars now.

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