COMMON COLDS AND “’FLU”

Press, Volume LXXII, Issue 21860, 13 August 1936, Page 5

COMMON COLDS AND “’FLU”

LITTLE REVEALED BY RESEARCH

DIFFICULTIES OP EXPERIMENTAL WORK

No man would earn more universal gratitude, perhaps, than the first man to discover a way to free humanity in some measure from the common cold or from ordinary influenza. But it appears from an article in the British Medical Journal that research into these two diseases has so far revealed little of practical value, and that it is carried on by comparatively few workers.

“Several bands of patient and privileged workers continue to wrestle with the problem of virus diseases of the respiratory tract,” states the article, “That such work emanates principally from two centres only is due to the fact that unlimited time and expensive facilities are needed for its successful prosecution. . . It need hardly be pointed out that the ability to produce a disease at will in an experimental animal, and to maintain individual strains of the causative micro-organism in this way, is an important step forward.” The research is made possible by tiie willingness of volunteers to submit to inoculation with influenza virus. What are called “protection tests” have been carried out with human serums and the virus of swine influenza; and when the influenza virus has been transmitted to human volunteers, very often nothing more than a common cold has been produced—a result which, the article states, the scientists are not prepared to explain. “Antibodies” which will neutralise the influenza virus have been found in a fair proportion of human serums. It appears also that the time of life at which these are most often present in sufficient quantity to give immunity from influenza is from one to five years. A scientific paper quoted by the journal gives instances of more than 100 inoculations of human beings with influenza, mentioning that the victims were accommodated in private wards and nursed under the most stringent conditions to prevent infection from outside. “But we are not told.” the journal states, "who they were and by what means or at what expense they were induced to undergo the treatment. Obviously the resources necessary for experiments of this kind are a bar to their execution; by all but a few investigators.”