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The common cold is possibly mankind's commonest ailment

In the year 2000 the European Committee for Studying the Common Cold was officially set up in Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland.

A doctor from the Common Cold Research Centre calculated that a person aged 75 would have had about 200 colds, and would therefore have spent some three years of his/her life sniffling, coughing and sneezing!

You have to be careful when talking about colds in different languages because in Spanish, for example, to have a cold is to be "constipado", whereas in English and French to be "constipated" means something quite different...!!!!