Common cold can block influenza flu: Researchers

Team Udayavani, Sep 7, 2020, 5:30 PM IST

Researchers claim that common cold can prevent the flu virus from infecting airways.

It is said that Rhinovirus, the most frequent cause of common colds, can prevent the flu virus from infecting airways by jumpstarting the body’s antiviral defenses

A Yale team led by Dr. Ellen Foxman studied three years of clinical data from more than 13,000 patients seen at Yale New Haven Hospital with symptoms of respiratory infection.

According to National Herald, in order to test how the rhinovirus and the influenza virus interact, rchers’ lab-created human airway tissue from stem cells that give rise to epithelial cells, which line the airways of the lung and are a chief target of respiratory viruses

They found that after the tissue had been exposed to rhinovirus, the influenza virus was unable to infect the tissue. The presence of rhinovirus triggered production of the antiviral agent interferon, which is part of the early immune system response to invasion of pathogens