Sneeze: The History and Science of the Common Cold
About this ebook
When it comes to understanding the common cold, we have all had plenty of first-hand experience. We are all too familiar with the symptoms of the cold virus, having caught and fought one every few months on average. At this point, the cold is seen as an inevitable inconvenience, rather than an illness that should be wiped out.
Dr David Miles, a world-leading immunologist, has amassed over a century of research on the common cold, starting from the foundational discovery that colds are caused by viruses, up to developments made during the pandemic.
In Sneeze, Dr Miles looks at what exactly colds are and where they come from, to reveal practical steps we can take to avoid catching them, fighting them and, perhaps most ambitiously, the steps that we as a society can take to make our environment less conducive to spreading them.
Comprehensive and richly detailed, Sneeze is the story of the common cold, and why it doesn't need to be as common as we have come to imagine.
About the author
David Miles has two decades of experience as a scientist and educator in the field of infectious disease immunology. He began his scientific career as a zoologist before moving to Gambia to study the infant immune response to vaccines against infectious diseases, and spent the ten years leading research projects there, in Malawi and in South Africa. David's research career was ended by a lymphoma, the treatment for which wiped out his immune system and left him more vulnerable to infection than a newborn baby. He moved into education as a tutor on the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine's distance learning MSc in infectious diseases. His first book was How Vaccines Work (Piatkus, 2023).
