Hey guys, I'm new to this sub and I know the post clearly says "cold virus" but there is another pathogen that I personally find fascinating in this subject and I would like the share with you all :) so stick with me. I have my masters in immunology and I've always found a prion to be the most interesting "pathogen" if you will. Though not much is known about prions, they are basically misfolded protein from your own body. Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease is the human prion disease however you may have heard of mad cow disease as well which is a prion disease in cows. Anyway so these proteins are misfolded forms forms of protein your body already makes. (in order to function properly proteins must be folded in a specific way). These misfolded bastards make their way up to the brain and actually recruit other perfectly healthy proteins to misfold and misfold and misfold until for lack of a better analogy, turns your brain to Swiss cheese causing dementia and neurological symptoms....so where does this leave the immune system right. The badasses of the body, the immune cells, are actually useless against prions, in fact evidence suggests the immune system may help the prions get to the brain...but that's a different story. In the spirit of this thread and the fantastic analogy already given. Prions are basically a peasant (protein) who the defenders of the castle just see as a friendly peasant, this peasant recruits all this friends and family to turn bad like them , they all aggregate and mess with the normal function of the castles structure and slowly diminish its function overall.

Again first post and I'm sorry its so long but prions are really super cool and I encourage everyone to look up more information on this crazy "pathogen" because there is a lot of cool data and information on it. (sorry if there is typos or grammar issues. I'm a scientist.)