The average for infants and pre-school children is 4 to 8 colds a year. As children get older, they develop resistance to more types of cold virus, and catch progressively less each year. Resistance increases through adult life, so that the elderly may have no colds in a year, or only one. The average is 3 colds per year over an 80 year life span, which is about 250 colds in a lifetime. Just think that if each one lasted a week that is about 5 years of life with a cold.
Cold symptoms tend to be mild, and build up slowly .
They usually start within 24 hours of infection with a scratchy, irritating throat and sneezing. The symptoms increase over the next one or two days with the throat often becoming sore, and a runny nose. This is the time to treat the symptoms to make you feel better, and help your body fight the infection. Adults do not usually have a raised temperature, but children often do, and this should be treated. A cold normally lasts about a week , but may drag on to two weeks, but it is quite common to catch a second cold before you have recovered from the first, and this looks as if the first infection has just gone on for a much longer time than expected.