After last week’s brutally cold and rainy football game I have heard a lot of students complaining they are sick and then proceed to blame it on the cold weather. My whole life my mom has always encouraged me to wear a coat and bundle up when it is cold, but refuted the idea of cold weather making you sick since she works in the medical field. Although she has always said that I have always been curious to if it actually makes you sick, and with all the recent complaints after the football game I decided to do some research on the topic. My question being is there a correlation between cold weather and a cold or the flu?

For the longest time the idea of cold weather causing a cold has been seen as a myth, and Dr. Carl Olden from Yakima, Washington is going right along with the idea of it being a myth. He explained that “people in Canada and Alaska live above the arctic circle have no more colds than people who live in Australian” (Olden). He does say though, that cold air and respiratory disease are connected but is way more complicated than having a direct causation. It leads me to question if more studies are done if they will find the causation of if it will forever be a “myth”.

Although many scientists say that cold weather doesn’t directly cause a cold, they say a cold nose itself increases your chances of getting sick. Scientists at Yale University wanted to figure out why rhinoviruses replicate more inside a cold nose rather than warmer parts of the body. They decided to research rhinoviruses in mice to study how temperature affects a viruses ability to spread infection. In this study the “X” variable being the temperature of where the rhinovirus is and the “Y” being the cold. They compared the viruses ability to spread at a temperature of 98.6 degrees F, or the bodies core temperature, and at 91 degrees which is the temperature inside the nose. The scientists found that cold viruses thrive at cooler temperatures inside the nose which effects the ability to fight off infection.  This finding is able to reject the null hypothesis, which would be that cold noses don’t help the spread of infection and is either correct or a false positive. These findings could explain why when we have a cold a lot of problems derive from the nose, and show a correlation between cold noses and illness but still nothing along the lines of cold weather itself and having a cold.

I personally don’t believe the cold weather makes us sick myth, but I do find the research of the lower temperatures in the nose leading to sickness interesting. I think if more research is done beyond the Yale researchers they will be able to make many discoveries, and see if this finding is beyond chance and actually something that holds true. I will definitely still take precautions this winter and cover my face as I walk because the evidence found from the research is convincing and something I want to take precautions of.