They literally wrote to me in the comments. When I read it for the first time, I immediately imagined a virus covered with these receptors like mushrooms or flowers, and some kind of garbage stuck to it.
But it turned out that this is not at all the case. This is said about a bacterial infection that joins in children for the common cold. Rather, not even about a bacterial infection, but about green or yellow snot. People believe that colored snot indicates a bacterium.
People are wrong.
1984
It was in 1984 that a very elegant study with green snot was published.
For several years, scientists have studied the noses of young people. They caught people with colds and very carefully put cotton swabs in their noses.
Careful, because it was impossible to touch the threshold of the nose. There people pick with their fingers, and there is always a lot of infection.
With cotton swabs it was necessary to crawl into the very depths of the nose. Natural nasal bacteria live there.
Swabs were taken on the first day of illness, then on the second, fourth, eighth, sixteenth, thirty-second and sixty-fourth.
Then crops were made from cotton swabs and counted. It turned out that, regardless of time, sick people had the same number of microbes in their noses.
Yellow or green snot appeared in patients for 3 - 5 days, and then gradually faded.
It turns out that with or without green snot, the number of microbes does not change. That is, nothing sticks to the virus. The virus itself makes green snot.
Of course, there are purulent complications like sinusitis or otitis media. They happen in about 5% of cases with a common cold. Such complications cannot be prevented. This is another story.
I also liked the idea of sniffing from those scientists from 1984. They looked at how the fluidity of the mucus in the nose was disturbed, and it turned out that the snot of course becomes sticky, but this stickiness is compensated by constant sniffing. Roundtrip. That is, sniffing keeps the mucus moving.
In short, almost everyone has green snot during a cold, but this is not due to bacteria. You don't have to be afraid.
