The London Weather Station

Your favourite weathergal is reporting from sneeze-land! ;)

I don’t know whether you are experiencing anything similar, but I have been surrounded at work by my colleagues suffering with flu and I cannot believe I have not caught it yet myself (probably now I have jinxed it!). The only thing I am experiencing at the moment is spring tiredness.

My poor mum has been feeling under the weather and coughing since our skiing holiday over New Years.

But why is it that we are much more likely to catch a cold or a flu in winter when it is cold? The US National Institutes of Health have released a study that explains the phenomenon:

What happens is that the viruses coat themselves in fatty material that hardens to a gel, protecting them in the cold. When the virus in it’s little fat coat get to the respiratory tract – the higher temperatures dissolve the fat coats and leave the virus free to infect cells.

As a UK expert - Professor John Oxford, - pointed out – and that was my first thought also - how come some viruses also thrive in tropical climates? Many of us have experienced the situation where you go on holiday someplace warm and you come down with a nasty flu that last and lasts for days and your nose runs and runs without end, just because you allowed your body to relax!

He said: "If this is the case why do we get flu in tropical areas, where the temperature is 35C (95F) all the time?
"Places like Vietnam and Indonesia are predicted to the epicentre of a new outbreak of pandemic flu."

Without it’s fatty coat the virus quickly dies as it has no defense against the elements. Still, the coat is so resistant that it cannot be dissolved by some detergents allowing the virus to live.

Dr Duane Alexander, director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, said: "The study results open new avenues of research for thwarting winter flu outbreaks.
"Now that we understand how the flu virus protects itself so that it can spread from person to person, we can work on ways to interfere with that protective mechanism."

Professor Oxford said researchers had tried to link flu infection definitively to cold weather since the great Russian outbreak of 1890, but had failed to come up with conclusive proof of a link.
"I don't think this study provides anything like a definitive answer on the spread of the virus - there must be some other factors that come into play," he said.