Scientists Believe There's Finally A Cure For The Common Cold (dailymail.co.uk)

schwit1 writes: After decades of research, the fabled cure for the common cold could be on its way in the form of a nasal spray called SynGEM, the brainchild of a Dutch biotechnology company. After successful tests on mice and rats (yes, they get colds too), 36 human volunteers at London's Imperial College are now trying out the spray.
While colds can be caused by hundreds of different viruses, just three viruses are responsible for 80% of them -- and yet colds are responsible for 40% of the sick days taken in the U.S., according to another article, as well as 75 million doctor visits (costing $7.7 billion) every year, plus another $2.9 billion for cold medications. One experimental medicine professor at London's Imperial College London has spent the last 30 years researching colds and flu, and though a cure has never been found, he now tells the Daily Mail, "I think we are on the verge of it. I really do."

Comments

About to be excited

[Anonymous Coward]

Until I saw TFA is from the DailyMail

Re:About to be excited

[AAWood]

Even the Daily Mail sometimes gets it right. Whether they did this time, I don't know, but it is in line with what I have read over the last year from more reliable sources.

That's kinda the point. Talking about a groundbreaking medical breakthrough and giving the Mail as a source is a bit like trying to convince someone that global warming is real by directing them to your weird drunken uncle who also supports the flat earth theory and thinks all muslims are terrorists; you may be right, but you've chosen an awful method of convincing anyone of it.

I'd genuinely love a few links to those reliable sources you mentioned; I can't trust a word the Mail publishes.

Sickdays==Lossofprofits, can't have those!

[Anonymous Coward]

it nice to see, that something as a human being sick, is calculated as corporate loss.

Re:Sickdays==Lossofprofits, can't have those!

[hackwrench]

He may not fully understand why it seems bad, but it is part of a trend to value human life as well as almost everything else in terms of money alone.

Re:Sickdays==Lossofprofits, can't have those!

[Paul Carver]

He may not fully understand why it seems bad, but it is part of a trend to value human life as well as almost everything else in terms of money alone.

Are you aware that the sole purpose of money, the only reason it exists, is to enable people to assign values to things? If we didn't care about comparing values of arbitrary combinations of things we could just use a barter system. The wealthy could get just as wealthy owning land and machinery and livestock and fuel, we'd just have a much harder time comparing how wealthy they are if nobody assigned numbers in fungible units to those things.

Complaining about people measuring value in money is like complaining about measuring sound volume in decibels. The sound's not going to get any louder or quieter just because you''re squeamish about assigning a numeric value to it's current volume.

Maybe you don't want to know the value of a human life. Maybe it makes you uncomfortable to even think about the question of whether every human life has precisely equal value in quantifiable units. Maybe you hope to never allow yourself to think about how much money you'd be willing to spend to extend a stranger's life by sixty seconds.

But that doesn't mean that "money" isn't the appropriate class of units in which to measure "value" and if life has any value at all then money is the correct thing to use to estimate that value in units that can be compared against other things of value. Decibels for sound volume, kilograms (or other mass units) for mass, meters (or other length units) for distance, and dollars (or other monetary units) for value.

Just because you'd prefer not to know what the number is, doesn't mean that it can't be measured. Nor does your preference not to know affect which units are appropriate for quantifying the measurement.

"Sick" days

[NotInHere]

Maybe the common cold is used as a method 40% of the time to get a sick day, but that doesn't mean that its actually the cause.

Is balanced

[bigbang137]

But it gets balanced out by the assholes who show up to work sick with a cold, soon contaminating their coworkers.

Re:Is balanced

[Anonymous Coward]

Do that asshole allowed to take days off? Can he take 2 weeks off until all the symptom wear off? Is that even acceptable or realist?

Statistically I Should Be Immortal

[mentil]

Sure, those three viruses may currently account for 80% of colds (although I suspect it's regional, and the culprits vary from place to place, like the Flu viruses) but if they're eliminated, people not staying home sick with one of those three will instead be exposed to one of the other hundreds of cold viruses until they get sick. Now a different set of 3 viruses will account for most colds, but there will be just as many colds. Anyone who works with the airline industry is still going to get sick frequently.

Additionally, saying there's an $11 billion+ 'cost' of colds is disingenuous, as that money trades hands. From the point of view of the medical industry, they'd be losing $billions every year if the common cold were to be cured. Salaried positions tend to have X amount of paid sick days, which are redeemed by the employee no matter what, so employers pay that money whether or not the employee actually gets sick; you could say 'lost productivity costs' but if those sick days are taken as de facto vacation, the effect is the same. A large proportion of sick days are actually "my bipolar is kicking in and I'm too depressed to come into work" or "my child is sick" or "I need to do something today and you didn't give me off the day I asked for" etc. and those problems won't go away easily.