This is killing me!!!

Think for a moment, will ya:

What is common to:

• A type of upper respiratory infection
• A method of data storage and retrival
• An absence of emotion, especially affection or sympathy

Well, some of you unlucky few must have caught it in the middle of nowhere: COLD

The two most horrible words ever discovered by mankind: COMMON COLD

Why God? Why me? Why at this time, when I have come home for a peaceful 6-day vacation?

Why, when I have 5 interviews in the next 3 weeks? Why? Why?

Today morning, I woke up feeling very strange - A headache - Something that I had perhaps only 3-4 times in the last 21 years of my existence. All beacuse of this cold - Common Cold! Who the hell named it Common Cold? They should call it by it's least common name - "Acute viral nasopharyngitis"!

Imagine the confusion of the poor guy who has to tell a friend: "This cold is really heating up dude!" - WHAT? How can it be possible? Well, anything is possible in Engllish, I guess!

Well, as you are reading this shit anyways, I'll give you some nice facts about "Common cold":

• The common cold is the most common of all human diseases, infecting adults at an average rate of 2–4 infections per year, and school-aged children as many as 12 times per year.
• The reasons that the cold-virus concentrates in the nasopharynx rather than the throat may be the low temperature and high concentration of cells with receptors needed for the virus.
• Sneezes expel a significantly larger concentration of virus "cloud" than coughing. The "cloud" is partly invisible and falls at a rate slow enough to last for hours—with part of the droplet nuclei evaporating and leaving much smaller and invisible "droplet nuclei" in the air.
• Bacteria that are normally present in the respiratory tract can take advantage of the weakened immune system during a common cold and produce a coinfection. Middle ear infection (in children) and bacterial sinusitis are common coinfections. A possible explanation for these coinfections is that strong blowing of the nose drives nasal fluids into those areas.
• The common cold is caused by a large variety of viruses, which mutate quite frequently during reproduction, resulting in constantly changing virus strands. Thus, immunization is highly impractical.
• Some people have reported that inhaling warm air (such as steam from very hot tap water) for five to 15 minutes can cure or substantially limit the symptoms of a cold. These reports may be based on the fact that rhinovirus cannot survive at elevated temperatures for more than a few minutes. Because of this weakness, rhinovirus infects the outer membranes of the throat and sinuses, where it is not exposed to normal human body temperature.
• Publications in the 1960s and 1970s suggested that large doses of vitamin C could both prevent as well as reduce the effects of the common cold. A well known supporter of this theory was Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling, who publicly advocated the intake of large doses of vitamin C to prevent infection. In 1970 he wrote the bestseller "Vitamin C and the Common Cold".
• Arguably the most common communicable disorder that humans can be afflicted with, the cold is considered something of a common cultural point of reference. Thus, catching a cold is often used as a plot device in various stories, movies, and television series.
• A study reports that in the US, an estimated 189 million school days are missed annually due to a cold. As a result, parents missed 126 million workdays to stay home to care for their children. When added to the workdays missed by employees suffering from a cold, the total economic impact of cold-related work loss exceeds $20 billion. In the UK, £67,692,708.08 were lost in the cause of workdays lost due to rhinovirus.

Boy, this Common Cold is really causing huge economic losses! I hope that someday, someone makes a device, a kind-of a neutron bomb that wipes out only the Cold-virus off the face of planet earth.

Till the cold cools down....