Why are people prone to cold season respiratory disease?

Dr. Le Khac Bao, Deputy Faculty of Respiratory Gia Dinh People's Hospital said that the cold season has many factors that make people more susceptible to respiratory diseases, related to the environment outside and inside the body.

Adverse factors in the environment outside the body

• The outside air becomes colder, the humidity changes are usually drier.These two cold and dry elements are more likely to irritate the airways than warm and moist air.
• Viruses that cause respiratory illnesses such as influenza viruses grow more easily in cold weather than in the hot season.
• The air is easy to be cramped, poorly circulated because in the cold season, people tend to be less likely to move out of the street and stay indoors, closing doors to avoid cold air from entering.This is a favorable factor for microbial agents that exist in the air to be able to proliferate more.
• In the cold season, the day is short and the night is long, the number of hours with sunlight during the day also decreases.Especially in the northern provinces there are many days without seeing the sun.Sunlight with ultraviolet rays is a very important agent to destroy microbial agents.In winter, less sunlight is another reason why microorganisms can proliferate more.

The cold season has many factors that make people more susceptible to respiratory diseases.(Artwork: healthtap).

Factors that reduce the body's resistance

• The impact of the cold season seems unclear on healthy people but more clearly on people with chronic diseases.Chronic respiratory illnesses such as asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, bronchiectasis often become worse in the cold season than in the hot season.Chronic cardiovascular diseases such as heart failure, hypertension, and ischemic heart disease are also at greater risk in the cold season.
• Once chronic cardiovascular disease and severe respiratory distress add up during the cold season, it is also when the general resistance of the body decreases.Patients with these chronic diseases are therefore very susceptible to acute respiratory disease in the cold season.
• In countries where there is not much light in the winter, people often see a disease called "seasonal depression".In some cases of melancholy and severe depression, doctors must intervene by exposing patients to strong light called light therapy.Depression has been shown to be an important cause of reduced body resistance.

According to Dr. Bao, because the mechanism of developing respiratory disease in cold weather is to increase harmful factors from the environment and reduce the resistance inside the body, reducing the risk of disease must include "two public armor nose ".

Avoid contact with harsh environments and clean the living environment

• Avoid going out when the weather is too cold, too dry without protection like not wearing enough warm clothes, not covering your neck, not wearing a mask to warm the air before the air passes through your nose.
• A sudden change from hot (indoor) to cold (outside the home) is a mechanism that triggers more respiratory irritation than cold or hot temperatures.If not absolutely necessary, avoid leaving home early in the morning and avoid going home too late at night.
• Avoid crowded places, especially crowded places, are closed rooms because the density of microbial agents, if any, will be high and persist in the environment.
• Avoid polluting the environment because of behaviors like smoking in public places, discharging toxins in cigarette smoke into the environment.When you have a cold, wear a mask to avoid coughing the flu virus into the environment.When coughing must cover your mouth, cough into your elbow to avoid spreading the flu virus to the environment.
• Keep a well-ventilated environment with enough light to kill microorganisms if any.Even though it is cold, it is advisable not to close all doors in the house, but it is still necessary to open the door openly for better gas exchange and especially to allow sunlight to enter the house to kill bacteria. pathogenicity.When washing clothes, it's best to dry them in sunlight rather than just drying and ironing.

Improve the body's resistance

• Eating well, especially green vegetables, provides enough vitamins to help the body fight disease.Drinking enough water is a way to compensate for the loss of water through the air, through the skin in a cold and dry environment.It should be noted because the general trend is that people rarely drink enough water in the cold season.
• Get a flu shot at the beginning of the cold season , get pneumococcal shots every 5 years for people at risk to help increase the overall resistance of the body, thereby fighting the risk of respiratory disease.
• See a respiratory specialist for early detection and treatment of respiratory diseases if there are respiratory symptoms such as sneezing, runny nose, cough, sputum, fever.This action avoids the progression of the disease and causes complications, and avoids spreading the disease to others.

Washing the nose and throat are two measures that can be taken to protect the nose and throat. Nasal wash can be done with clean water or physiological saline 0.9%. Gargling with warm saline is fine, no need to use antiseptic and expensive and kill all beneficial bacteria in the throat. Frequent hand washing and dry cleaning are extremely effective measures to reduce the spread of pathogenic microorganisms from one person to another.