Parenting boosts resistance to colds

摘要

Children bring many things to their parents' lives: happiness, sleepless nights... and viruses. But although parents do catch infections from their kids, it seems parents are also more resistant to colds and flu. Sheldon Cohen and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, reviewed three studies in which researchers put either a flu virus or a rhinovirus, which causes colds, into people's noses, then tracked who fell ill. Cohen's team found that parents were only 48 per cent as likely to develop an infection as people with no kids.