CAUSES OF COLDS

Press, Volume LXXXVII, Issue 26538, 28 September 1951, Page 3

CAUSES OF COLDS

EXPERIMENTS IN BRITAIN

(N.Z. Press Association —Copyright)

LONDON, September 26.

Getting wet feet, standing in damp clothes, or sitting in draughts, does not cause colds, according to the results of experiments on “human guinea pigs” in Britain. Dr. C. Andrewes. a scientist at the Common Cold Research Institute at Salisbury, announced this to-day. The experiments were carried out with three groups of six persons. Those in the first group were given hot baths and then stood wet in a draughty corridor for half an hour. They then dressed and put on wet socks

The second group received small doses of cold virus.

The third had both the virus and bath treatment. This group walked in the rain and sat in unheated rooms in wet clothes for an hour. After changing they kept their wet socks on. “In no case did chilling produce any colds, nor could we satisfy ourselves that it increased susceptibility to a very small dose of virus,” said Dr. Andrewes. He added that he was not prepared to say that chilling did nothing to give people colds All he could say was that the tests had failed to prove that. Chilling, he said, was “one of the pieces of folk lore which keeps cropping up.”