The Cold Doesn’t Give You a Cold

Button up or you’ll catch cold.” Age-old advice we’ve all heard. But
temperature does not cause colds. Colds are caused by viruses
transmitted person to person. The best way to prevent getting a cold is to
wash your hands to prevent the spread of the virus through contact.
THE SICKNESS WE call a cold is called a cold in most languages of the
world. The idea that being cold can give you a cold has been widely held
for centuries. Yet science has found no evidence for this belief.
One of the fi rst studies on the matter more than a half century ago
took a group of volunteers and exposed half to warm temperatures and
half to cold. There was no difference in their likelihood of their catching
a cold. Indeed, we know today that colds are common at every latitude
and longitude in the world, from the deserts to the Arctic.
Some of the most interesting studies on the subject have come from
small, isolated communities such as island villages. Among these studies
is a 1931 fi eld study of Longyear City, an Arctic coal-mining settlement
midway between the Norwegian mainland and the North Pole. For seven
months of the year, the town’s fi ve hundred residents were iced in, and
during that time colds were almost nonexistent. However, the arrival in
port of the fi rst ship of summer invariably brought with it a full-blown
cold epidemic, leading researchers to conclude that being cold, by itself,
is irrelevant to catching a cold.
Researchers found that more than 50 percent of people surveyed thought
they could catch a cold by not wearing a coat in winter. Almost 60 percent
believed chilly weather could cause a cold. Less than 10 percent correctly
identifi ed viruses as the transmitters of colds. (University of Texas Southwestern
Medical Center 2002a)