You’d think curing a case of the sniffles would be a cinch for the scientists who invented artificial hearts and defeated lethal diseases like smallpox and polio. But eliminating the common cold is tricky because it’s actually caused by more than 200 evolving viruses that all produce the same symptoms (whereas smallpox was caused by just one virus).
The common cold has evaded medical science’s advances for two primary reasons. The first issue is that there is not just one single culprit. Colds are most often caused by a rhinoviruses — a large family of viruses with hundreds of variants. This makes vaccination impossibility and gives our immune system a challenging task.
Secondly, these viruses evolve rapidly — so even if we could produce vaccines to cover the full spectrum of rhinoviruses, they would quickly become resistant.
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