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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the discovery of various viruses, I was glad to read about the work of the Common Cold Unit, founded in 1946, that originally made me avoid my usual ban on reading books with a medical flavour.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.

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