New research on photo-immunology has revealed that exposing the body to intense sunlight for an hour or more at a time—as while sunbathing—can suppress the immune system for as long as fifteen days.
Immuno-suppression occurs because 15 percent of the blood is constantly in the capillaries of the skin where solar radiation may easily damage lymphocytes. This phenomenon is easily proved by the fact that many people who sunbathe in strong sunlight for periods of an hour or more frequently experience fever blisters on the mouth shortly afterwards. These busters are caused by Herpes Simplex Virus #1 which can emerge only when the immune system is suppressed.
For the same reason, people often come down with a cold or flu after sunbathing. So if you’re planning a midwinter beach vacation in the Caribbean or Mexico, be sure to take along plenty of sunscreen block.
Smoking not only increases your risk of catching a viral infection but it also intensifies the symptoms and prolongs the duration. Worse still, it triples the risk of a complication.
To begin with, irritants in tobacco smoke paralyze the cilia; the hair-like ceils that sweep invading viruses out of the nasal passages. As a result, a smoker runs twice the risk of catching a cold as does a nonsmoker. Smoking also seriously impairs immunocompetence. Among many studies confirming this fact was a recent Australian investigation which found that smokers had
below-normal levels of killer T cells. However, six weeks after some of the subjects in the study decided to quit smoking, their levels of killer T cells began to increase. In a few months, normal levels were restored.
Other studies have shown that smoking reduces the beneficial effects of vitamin C and other essential nutrients by at least forty per cent.
Hence you should stop smoking completely at the first sign of a cold. If you can refrain from smoking for the duration of a cold or flu attack, you may decide to quit altogether.
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