John Yang:
A cold nose, the old saying goes may be good for dogs. But for you and me, maybe not so much. New research suggests that cold weather may actually affect the body's immune response, making us more susceptible to COVID, colds, flu and other upper respiratory infections.
Dr. Benjamin Bleier is a sinus specialist at Mass Eye and Ear in Boston. He teaches at the Harvard Medical School and he's the senior author of this study.
Dr. Buyer, I want to — have I got this right, that when it comes to fighting viruses, there is more going on, maybe not right under our noses, but more going on in our noses than previously understood?
Dr. Benjamin Bleier, Mass Eye and Ear: Yes, that's right. In fact, what our study found, which takes off on some work we had done previously, several years ago, was that inside the front of our noses, when we're exposed to a virus, there's a whole sort of war going on. Whereas when our nose detects the presence of a virus, the cells released these swarms of bubbles, which we call vesicles, that have several functions. One is they actually bind to the virus. They stick to the viruses themselves sort of mopping up the virus before it has a chance to infect ourselves. But not only that, but these bubbles actually directly kill the virus when they bind to it. So essentially, these viruses don't have a chance to infect ourselves because of these bubbles, these vesicles that get into our mucous.
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