Skip to main content

Sneeze - David Miles ****

If I'm honest, I was disappointed by David Miles' definition of a cold. He tells us 'Within these covers, a cold is an illness caused by a virus that infects the upper respiratory tract and, in most cases, clears up within a matter of days or possibly weeks without requiring medical intervention. This definition is the reason I included the influenza viruses and the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 as cold viruses.'

To me, this doesn't seem fair. As far as I'm concerned, the term 'common cold' refers to exactly what I'm suffering from as I write this: a subset of such viruses that definitely does not include either of those killers. I've read far too much about COVID and generally avoid books covering it like the plague (sorry). Miles argues that 'some infections with every type of cold virus lead to some sort of serious illness.' But the reason I was more interested in this book, was I wanted to read about the relatively harmless but irritating colds and the history of attempts to understand it, including those famous experiments where people were paid small amounts to catch a cold.

Despite my disappointment, this isn't a bad book. I was hooked as a reader by the thought - obvious when you think about it but we rarely do - that the idea that the cold has been part of being human for as long as there have been humans is not true. Such diseases can only be persistent in an interconnected society, so are relatively modern, dating back a few thousand years. Come back hunter gatherers, all is forgiven.

Miles gives us very readable chapter and verse on what colds are (using, of course, his definition) and how they work. I loved the idea of asking 'When did the first person catch the first cold?' In that chapter he describes the way that DNA was extracted from a 30,000-year-old tooth and used to identify five viruses - four herpes-style, but one a group C adenovirus, the type of bug that typically causes a cold. After working through the discovery of various viruses, I was glad to read about the work of the Common Cold Unit, founded in 1946, that originally made me avoid my usual ban on reading books with a medical flavour.

A final section turns our thinking about the nature of colds on its head, looking into ways that we attempt to counter colds, or their symptoms. This might not have been the book I was expecting, but it didn't stop it from being an engaging biological journey into the life and times of these irritating and sometimes deadly viruses.

Hardback:   
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
These articles will always be free - but if you'd like to support my online work, consider buying a virtual coffee or taking out a membership:
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mathematics with Love – Mary Stopes-Roe *****

Admittedly it’s early days (this review is written in January), but this, for me, is the surprise hit of the year so far! I approached this book with trepidation, but found it absolutely delightful. It is described on the cover as the “courtship correspondence of Barnes Wallis, inventor of the bouncing bomb”, and contains a series of letters between Wallis and his cousin and eventual wife Molly Bloxham, along with some useful annotation by their daughter, Mary. The courtship itself is not without difficulties, as Wallis was 18 years older than the 17-year-old Molly at the start of the correspondence, and her father, not surprisingly, wasn’t too pleased about the interest of such an elderly suitor, but that isn’t the only reason the letters are interesting – it’s also because of maths, and Wallis’s position in the UK as the engineering hero of the Second World War. (Incidentally, it seemed very strange to see letters addressed to “Barnes” – I had always assumed Barnes Wallis was a ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...
Post a Comment
Read more

On Time - Jim Al-Khalili *****

By a small margin Jim Al-Khalili's The World According to Physics is my favourite of his books, both because the 'three pillars' concept at its heart works so well - but also because it's short. On Time is somewhat heavier, but thankfully not a wrist-buster. It might seem at first sight odd that a book on a subset of physics is considerably longer than one covering the whole thing, but time is one of those subjects that inevitably involves considerable complexities and needs depth. As Al-Khalili establishes, it's hard to think of any other scientific concept where our perception of it - what he refers to as manifest time or psychological time - is so different from the view from physics. Some physicists go so far as to suggest that time doesn't exist at all. In the book, Al-Khalili sets out (to my mind quite successfully) both to explain why they think this is the case, but also why it's not the best interpretation of time. I'd certainly note that I...
Post a Comment
Read more