Part I

The article on Immunology & Infectious Diseases discusses why people can get a disease twice. Under normal circumstances chickenpox and other diseases could only infect you once. One of the situations mentioned in which you could get the disease twice was the ability of a disease to mutate. For instance if you catch the common cold, you can get a slight variation of it very quickly after you feel well. The cold constantly mutates and alters its tendencies, which makes it hard for your immune system to recognize and fight the cold very sucessfully.

Also there are different viruses that lead to the same cold. So you could catch a cold from one virus, and then catch the same type of cold from a different virus. There are so many viruses that its not unlikely to catch two diffrerent colds. Since the next cold you get could be caused by a different virus, however prviously having a cold does not necessary help protect. You could also get the same cold from the same virus, that slighly mutates. Such as the flu, it continues to make new strains. So much that a new flu vaccination is made every year. Hypothetically your body destroyes a infection and remembers the infection so that you wont get it again. This happens best when there is a speciic cold that doesnt change much.

My reaction to this article:

I thought this article was intersting because i didnt know exactly why you werent supposed to get diseases twice. I did not know that your body hides the infection of chickenpox, i thought it killed it off and you were no longer subceptible to the infection. I also did not know that chickenpox was related to herpes. I dont think there will be a cure for the common cold or flu any time soon because of how many ways it can change. There is just no simple fix for either infection. Theres too much information to research and if you are able to eliminate or protect against a single strain it would be useless. A person with the cold would not know which version of the cold that had, and would not know which medicine to take to fight it.