Promising, cheap cure for common cold?

Press, 12 April 1984, Page 20

Promising, cheap cure for common cold?

By refusing to swallow a zincgluconate lozenge, insisting on sucking it instead, a young leukaemia patient from Austin, Texas, may have stumbled on to a cure for the common cold. Karen Eby (then three, now eight and well) was being given the tablet because children with leukaemia are often deficient in zinc. As it happened, when she baulked, she was just coming down with a cold.

An hour or so later, her sniffles and scratchy throat had vanished. Coincidence? A preliminary trial suggests not Her father, Mr George Eby, brought Karen’s surprising cure to the attention of Dr William Halcomb, the family doctor, and Dr Donald Davis, a nutrition scientist and statistician at the Clayton Foundation Biochemical Institute of the University of Texas-Austin. At first, the three men timidly tried the remedy only on friends, relatives — and themselves. By 1981, convinced they were on to something, they advertised for volunteers with colds to take part in a trial, Colds typically last 10-12 days. To qualify as participants, the volunteers had to have had their colds for no more than three days. Some were given zinc-glu-conate lozenges and others lookalike, taste-alike dummy tablets; neither group knew which. The treated adults used two 23milligram tablets at the outset of the week-long experiment and one every two hours they were awake thereafter (never'more than 12 in aj£y one day); the dosage was

From ‘The Economist,’ London

halved for children weighing less than 601 b. The volunteers were told to suck on the tablets, or simply to let them dissolve, to ensure a prolonged contact of the medication with the tissues of the mouth and throat.

Because they were paying for the trial themselves, Mr Eby, Dr Halcomb and Dr Davis could not afford to identify precisely which nasties were making their patients ill — whether the rhinoviruses responsible for the common cold or something else. But Dr Halcomb did try to exclude volunteers with evident signs of a bacterial infection and those with a previous history of respiratory allergies. So probably most participants had garden-variety colds. The results, published recently in “Anti-microbial Agents andjChe-

motherapy,” the journal of the American Society for Microbiology, were promising. Regardless of the severity of the colds — as judged by such symptoms as headache, fever, coughing, sneezing, muscle pain and runny noses — the 37 patients in the zinctreated group got well in an average of 3.9 days, and 32 had recovered fully within a week. By contrast, the colds of the 28 patients given dummy tablets lasted almost 11 days on average.

As the experimenters themselves point out, these results are not conclusive (although work by a Du Pont researcher has suggested that, in the test tube, zinc is indeed an arch-enemy of rhinoviruses). They hope expert cold researchers will now take up the running.

Among those who have expressed interest in doing so are Dr Jack Gwaltney of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and Dr David Tyrrell of the British Medical Research Council’s' common cold unit in Salisbury. In the meantime, health shops may have a boom. (In America, most stock zinc-gluconate as a cheap, over-the-counter nutritional supplement.) If you intend to join the queues, two words of advice. Although reckoned safe, the stuff is bitter, can mildly irritate some mouths, temporarily alter the sense of taste — and, if taken on an empty stomach, cause nausea. Also, according to Dr Halcomb, it works best when taken early, at the first sign of a cold. J Copyright—The Economist. • *