PRACTICAL SUGGESTIONS.

Kaipara and Waitemata Echo, 2 October 1914, Page 8

PRACTICAL SUGGESTIONS.

HOW COLDS ARE CAUGHT.

We are 'so ignorant of the real nature of that common and disagree^able ailment known familiarly as a cold that we d.o in nine cases out of 10, with the idea of preventing it, the very thing from which it arises. Catarrh of the nasal mu-cous-membrane is contracted not from exposure to cold air, as is generally supposed, but from want of fresh air. Man, abandoning natural habits and evading sometimes not purposely at all but from necessity, the stiTnulation afforded by exercise, shuts himself in overheated, ill-ventilated rooms, where immunity to infection is lowered, and the mass influence of the infecting bac* teria is greatly increased. Coming out of such a warm room, a sense of discomfort is felt on encountering the pure fresh air, and when in the course of the next day a man develops the catarrh with its attendant miseries of running nose and stinging throat, perhaps also headache, he puts the trouble down, not to the real cause, the germ-in-fected, poisonous atmosphere of the room, but to an imaginary chill which he fully believes he caught outside. People who s.jend nearly all their time out of doors, or who, being employed inside, are able to insist on free ventilation, seldom suffer from colds ; if they catch one it is usually from someone else.