As I said in my last post, I’m at home sick. It’s nothing serious, just a bad cold. In a couple of days my immune system will have kicked its sorry ass and I’ll be fine again.

However, despite it being nothing more than a bad cold, I am staying at home. Not only do I feel like I’ve been kicked in the face repeatedly by someone wearing boots covered in runny cow excrement, I have no desire to pass it on to anyone else.

I have noticed, in recent years, a veritable proliferation of products claiming to prevent, relieve or cure the symptoms of the common cold. Even ‘flu, although what most people call ‘flu is not the debilitating, three-weeks-in-bed-feeling-like-death of proper influenza (trust me, I’ve had it): it’s a bad cold. “Flu” is a diminutive, and I suppose the illness is as well.

Go to your local chemist’s and you can get everything from Lemsip to relieve symptoms to First Defence to stop you getting them and even anti-viral tissues to stop your bogies passing it on. All of these products are sold on the premise that the proper thing to do is to get on with it. No lollygagging around at home in bed for the upright, responsible 21st century citizen! No! Front and centre, man! Get that Beecham’s All In One down your neck and let’s be avin’ you at your desk like a proper soldier!

It occurred to my rather cynical head that the inherent assumption that we should all be prepared to go to work despite being at war with a virus does little more than provide an ever-growing market in which pharmaceutical companies can ply their preventative wares. Because while the various pills and potions might relieve the symptoms, making you feel like you might just about be able to cope with dragging yourself to work and putting a brave face on it, you are still infectious. You are still capable of passing it on. Which means that other people will have to buy the pills and potions in order to drag themselves to work, while the rest of your colleagues, seeing the illness spreading like wildfire, will empty the shelves of prophylactics on the basis that they kill 99.9% of germs.

Let’s just think about that for a moment. The rhinovirus (one of the various cold-causing virii) is so small you could line up 50,000 of them inside a millimetre. You can fit quite a number of those in a drop of snot. It only takes 1-30 to start an infection and they can survive for up to 3 hours outside the body. Most transmission occurs when someone touches a contaminated surface and then touches his own face (or, presumably, someone else’s). A victim becomes infectious 8 hours after infection and the degree of infectivity increases with the symptoms, which start 1 – 3 days after infection and peak 2 – 3 days after that. In that whole process there is a helluva lot of opportunity to pass on the disease.

Let’s say you had OCD and used 99.9% effective anti-viral wipes every time you touched something. In an office containing a couple of infected people, and so many viral particles produced by sneezing, coughing, or manual transmission to objects, how many thousands of virus particles do you think will survive the wipe? And we already know it only takes between 1 and 30 particles to cause infection. 99.9% of 50,000 still leaves more than enough to create another victim.

In other words, what happens when you down that Lemsip Max Strength and head to work to prove to your boss how responsible you are is that you take your nasty germs and give them to everyone else at the same time as making a stack of dosh for the various pharmaceutical companies who peddle their prophylactics and remedies. It’s not that the preventatives don’t work: the point is that they can’t be 100% effective and the cold virus is a fecund little bugger who will win hands down every time through sheer weight of numbers.

Then you’re down to the nasty-tasting paracetamol and fake-lemon drink. And even that can prolong the process — a fever is your body raising its temperature to levels that the invading germs don’t like in an attempt to kill them off. It means the immune system is doing its job, and by taking medication to stop this process you’re just prolonging the agony so that really, all you are doing is lengthening the time you will need to take the remedies in order to feel better.

More money to the pharm companies. In the UK, around £200 million/annum, according to The Ecologist.

So next time you see a television advert telling you that if you take Cold and Flu Begone you’ll be able to make that next sale, or get in your boss’s good books, remember that it’s the pharmaceutical company making the sale and your boss won’t like it when he’s got your cold.

Stay home, wrap up warm, drink plenty of fluids and remember the human body evolved to deal with minor infections like this long before we knew what a germ was.