Causal Chain

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I was reviewing Q19 from Section 1 of PT 27 answer choice A, which got me wondering about causal chains.

According to the stimulus, pollen can cause the release of histamines, and histamine cannot cause cold symptoms.
Answer A says: "Pollen and other allergens do not cause colds" and it is an incorrect answer.

Can we not link this up into a causal chain like "pollen --> histamine --> ~cold symptoms" and conclude (through the transitive property) that pollen cannot cause cold symptoms?
I know for conditional reasoning, if you have a chain like "a-->b-->~c" you can conclude "a-->~c", but is this not the case for causal reasoning?

In a similar vein, if you have a causal chain like "a causes b. b causes c", you CAN conclude that "a causes c," right?...

Thank you!

TexAgAaron

I think I see why A is wrong, though I didn't really use a logic chain.

A says, "Pollen and other allergens do not cause colds." The first premise given is that pollen and other allergens cause the release of histamine, but histamine does not cause colds. This is a MBT question.

We cannot conclude pollen and allergens don't cause colds; we know they cause you to produce histamine which doesn't produce colds. But whose to say that combined with something else, pollen and allergens don't cause colds? We just don't know/aren't given that info, which doesn't work here because it is a MBT question.

AC E, the correct choice, plays off the info given that antihistamines block the symptoms of histamines. When combined with the info given that histamines do not cause colds, we can deduct that antihistamines don't help with colds by blocking histamines but it would rather have to be by blocking/healing something else.

Hope this helps!