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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."
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."
Until I saw TFA is from the DailyMail
Saw this claim before about 20 years ago.
A drug called "Placonaril" by Viropharma.
Failed the FDA trial.
I hope this bunch does better.
I... a... a... achooo!
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
The "common cold" is really just a set of symptoms that might be related to any of over 200 viruses. The vaccine mentioned in the article is for one of those, RSV.
I can't find precise numbers, but according to this article, RSV causes less than 20% of colds. Interestingly, the number in this article has apparently recently been adjusted upwards from 10% as that number is still appearing in google caches.
So, this vaccine will not help for >80% of the cases of common cold. On the plus side, RSV is really bad in babies. So it still has value.
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.
I tried it and it works. As a side effect it causes your nose to fall off.
So, how does it smell? It Sphinx!
I'm not sure what your point is. If I stay healthy, that helps both me and the company that I work for. What's wrong with that?
The start of the Mallpox Season was yesterday- Black Friday.
There is no cure.
But it gets balanced out by the assholes who show up to work sick with a cold, soon contaminating their coworkers.
And when the planet hit the sun
I saw the face of Allison
Allison, Allison, Allison, Allison
But as long as we are going to go around spreading misinformation:
Sometimes I wish that I could stop you from talking
When I hear the silly things that you say
I think somebody better put out the big light
'Cause I can't stand to see you this way
Allison, I know this world is killing you
Oh, Allison, my aim is true
My aim is true
You are misinformed by like 20 years. We have antiviral medication that have cured quite a few diseases such as Hepatitis C and also the flu (Relenza, Tamiflu etc). They are a bit expensive though.
Which? The ones making NyQuil? LOL. Seriously, you believe they have any clout?
it nice to see, that something as a human being sick, is calculated as corporate loss.
You see... Employees are a company's most valuable asset and, um... Sorry, I forgot where I was going with this.
[ Pro Tip: When your employer starts saying crap like this, start looking for another job. ]
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
So now people fall sick from been worked too much...?
4wdloop
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.
The corporate lobbyists will influence the FDA to put a stop to this, pronto.
Why? Wouldn't corporations benefit from fewer employee sick days?
oh, great job scientists, what excuse am i supposed to use now?!
There are also corporate lobbyists that want to make sure this comes to market too. Also, even the owners of stock in companies that make cold medicine get sick, have children that get sick, etc. To assume that they'd allow human misery to continue to make a buck is assuming the worst in humanity.
Do you believe all the people that make medicines are in the business to profit from the misery of others? That is possible but it is also possible that they are in the business of relieving misery but to do so they need to pay the bills.
Also, it's not like curing the common cold will eliminate their market. People still get headaches, have trouble sleeping, get allergies, and so on. If you look at the ingredients of a common cold medicine and compare it to a common sleep aid like Tylenol PM you will see it's the same stuff. The stuff to treat allergies is also the same stuff to treat cold symptoms. If they don't sell enough cold medicine they'll just put a different label on it and sell it that way.
Let them lobby away, because the people in the FDA would quite likely want to see this on the market too. I can imagine the lobbyist money looks great until that government official gets a cold of their own.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Nonsense. In homeopathy they just put 1/100000000000000000000000000th of an onion in water, and the cold is guaranteed to be gone in a week. It just costs $200 a bottle, and is every bit as good as somebody putting their energy up your spirit.
Or just eat the garlic. Whole bulbs of it. Wario style.
From a reputable source: Dr. McCoy noted that modern medicine was still searching for a cure for the common cold in the 23rd century. McCoy found a number of promising biological candidates on Omega IV that might lead to a viable cure.
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.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
It's realistic to take the annual quadrivalent vaccine, to take a couple of days off, and/or to work from home until the risk of contamination has passed. It's also realistic to take some vitamin C, zinc and whey protein powder daily to assist with prevention.
Reminds me of this homeopathic cream somebody gave me for sore muscles.
The disclaimer said to consult a doctor if it didn't work within 3 weeks.
A doctor I called said to call him back if it didn't disappear by itself within 2 weeks.
Should I interpret this as saying the homeopathic shit would actually make it worse than doing nothing?
Needless to say, I threw the cream in the trash and the pain was gone in about a week.
I guess my further diluting of the homeopathic cream by not using it made it work better?
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$2.9 billion spent on cold medications... I'm sure the people profiting from selling cold medications will be very happy... Ohhh well, they still got cancer to support their livelihood.
AccountKiller
Careful. Homeopathic medicine can kill you if you don't take it.
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
Never got a cold anymore since I have been going to work with this good old bicycle. For years.
Now of course this only became possible once we didn't need to bring children to school, etc.
So probably there is room for chemical things...
Herve S.
I find this article and discussion odd. I have not had a cold in many years. For several years now since I've been using zinc oral spray and/or tablets prophylactically I have never come down with a full-blown cold. I've considered the cold cured by zinc for quite a while now. The trick is knowing when to use it and how much. Almost always I can quickly sense if there's a severe infection starting and know when to zinc up and how much. Usually only need to do one or a few doses of oral spray, but in difficult cases it may require multiple doses of oral tablets (2 tablets every few hours and in *really* bad cases 3 is ok).
The main side effects of zinc are 1) metallic tasting food especially fruit like strawberries; 2) nausea if taken on an empty stomach (not advised)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I expect they do have some clout what with that $11+ billion a year profits to spend. I doubt they'd bother trying to stop a common cold cure by this method though unless they could find side-affects with the cure.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
And also if you do. http://www.sacbee.com/news/bus...
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.
2 It must be cheap since if you do nothing most of the time it'll go away.
3 It must be very safe because if you do nothing most of the time it'll go away.
Those 3 reasons are probably the big ones why it didn't get developed before. (Since it'd be hard to make something that safe that worked that quickly and little money in the end.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Reminds me of a SciFi short story in the late 1960s. Some scientist invents a full cure for the cold. Trouble is, once the nasal passages are fully free of virus and snot and stuff, it turns out humans have an incredibly sensitive olfactory system. Teensie everyday levels of chemicals (smoke, perfume, flowers, etc) a painfully overloading the smell response. :-)
I'm not giving away the ending
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
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.
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.
Complaining about people measuring the value of human life in money is like complaining about measuring temperature rise in decibels. FTFY.
Different things have different units of measure; some of us understand that money is a wholly inappropriate metric for the value of human life.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Just wash your hands... well.
I started doing this a couple decades ago; wash hands well after doing or before doing any of the following:
Handling money
going out in public
Using the restroom
eating
before cooking anything
after getting home from anywhere for any reason
after touching anything else that belongs to someone else (so their computer keyboards, personal effects, etc.
Use real soap, warm water, lather up, rinse and then dry.
This will dramatically reduce your exposure to all kinds of bacteria and viruses, including cold viruses.
I get at most, one cold a year, sometimes I don't get one at all.
Never underestimate the power of words, like how some employees go ballistic when they're called resources "like we were cattle". Well tough you're hired to do a job and in that context you're just another input, like the bricks and the blender you need a bricklayer to make the wall. I usually sarcastically agree they're right, the proper term should be prostitute since we're pimping out our brains for cash.
I know that no matter how much they care about my physical and social well-being it's ultimately a means to an end and I'm not the end. The same way that no matter how much I care about my job it's ultimately a means to get compensation, perks, promotions, goodwill, recognition, references and so on, it's their goal not mine. That's the core of an employer-employee relationship, they're not my friend, family or partner and nobody should lose sight of that.
Which is not to say we shouldn't be on good terms, I think there's a lot of win-win in that. But I don't get angry when they refer to me as a tool to get a job done. And if they try any cog in the machinery analogies, I don't mind going to a restaurant analogy to say it's more like what happens when you drop-in replace tenderloin with shank because they're both beef. Hint: It's not going to be very good. Which I suppose is comparing myself to cattle. Moo.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
> Different things have different units of measure; some of us understand that money is a wholly inappropriate metric for the value of human life.
Money is how you buy longer life. Want safer highways? Gotta spend money. Better doctors? Want to see the doctor more often? That'll cost money. Want to test every piece of meat for contamination before it's sold? You're going to need to spend a lot of money.
You could go about your day very safe. In traffic, you could have a professional driver drive ahead of you and another behind you, to protect you from accidents. You could have two body guards in the car with you. That's how we protect the president. It costs a lot of money. You COULD choose to hire a body guard to protect your life rather than spending any money going out to eat, or buying a cool phone, or paying for any entertainment. You've decided protecting your life with a bodyguard isn't worth the money - you'd rather buy Olive Garden and a Nexus phone.
Here is the company's announcement of the clinical trials. Mucosis Initiates First-in-Human Study of SynGEM, a Needle-Free Nasal Spray RSV Vaccine
Have you read my blog lately?
In the US in the 1960s, all public school children were given multiple doses of the Sabin vaccine, usually mixed in a small amount of orange juice. No charge.
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"Human resources" is both less accurate and more demeaning than "personnel." Resources can't get up and walk away. There's no good reason to use inferior, obfuscatory terminology.
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Right now, today, you have a choice of whether to spend your money installing fire sprinklers in your home. It'll cost about $6,000. There' a 1/50,000 chance it'll save your life. As you decide whether or not to spend that $6,000 to protect your life, you are putting a dollar value on your own life.
Installing fire sprinklers in 100,000 homes will cost $600 million and save about 6 lives. ($10 million per life). Should we do that?
Does your answer change when you find out that by instead spending that $600 million educating kids and encouraging healthy habits we'd save about 25,000 times as many lives, from heart disease and similar killers? ($4,000 per life).
We can save lives for $10 million each, or spend that money saving more lives, at only $4K each). Why should we not spend the money on the $10 million/life idea? Because it's not worth it. It's not worth spending $10 million to save one life when you can instead spend that $10 million on saving 2,500 lives. Saving one life isn't worth $10 million.
Here are some costs to save lives in various ways.
http://www.payitforward.founda...
There are a lot of studies contrary to your claim; and your claim of "proof" is demonstrably false. For one thing, vitamin C is a mild antihistamine, so it reduces cold symptoms and reduces the perceived (and perhaps actual) duration of a cold.
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That's a gross oversimplification of ongoing research. As you stated it, it's just false.
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No nose, no rhinovirus. Brilliant!
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
If you read the material from the manufacturer, they are specifically working on a vaccine for RSV. RSV causes perhaps 20% of colds, depending on your data source. The remainder are caused by the rest...parainfluenza, coronavirus, rhinovirus, and other non-isolates. RSV is also most common in younger populations, so while I'm not discounting the value of reducing pediatric colds and their symptoms, it's less useful for adults. Perhaps they can expand their work to include other cold viruses, but right now they're specifically limiting the scope of their work.
You win the non sequitur award for today.
It's never been done, therefor it can't be done. But if it were done in this one case, it could be done in all cases.
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There are several cures; become a Buddhist and reject materialism, become Amish and reject materialism, become a hermit and reject materialsm...
That's a category error. Money can only measure the value of transactions; unless you're trading people as vendibles, applying a money count to human lifes is meaningless.
Sure you can count the price of medical care and sanitation, but that's not the value of life any more than the price of food and water is, even if you'd die without then.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
Just take a cold shower or bath now and then. No influenza nor anything of that kind in more than 20 years doing this (had quite a few before).
Just so long as you remember that money is a measure of price and not a measure of value. For example, consider what the price of a breath of air is vs its value.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Given that you can save lives at $4,000 each, you shouldn't spend your money at $10 million each. Saving a life isn't worth $10 million, because you can do more with that $10 million. The VALUE (market value, in fact) is less than $10 million.
> price and value are not the same, that you can't measure a thing's value by its price?
Quite the opposite. What you buy, at what price, is an objective measure of what you REALLY value. He COULD donate half his salary to save several lives. Instead, he probably choose to have a nicer car (or cars) than he needs, dinners out, etc. He made the choice, so clearly he VALUES the fancy car more than he values a stranger's life - he had to choose between the two, and he chose the car.
Death is ultimate cure for all ailments.
That's fine, I'm sure a lot of people would agree with you. Question for you, would you rather lose a million pounds/dollars/euros or your child?
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
A drug called "Placonaril" by Viropharma.
Pleconaril (Picovir) failed FDA trials, but not necessarily for the reasons you might think at first glance. The problem is that the FDA considers common colds to be a trivial health issue for the general public, with very low mortality. Easily treatable with supportive care. However, the segment of the population that might take this drug is very, very large (most of the population). As a result, the FDA will demand perfection from any clinical trials, with the bar set at an impossible to meet standard. Back when this drug was in development, I knew this is exactly what would happen -- the moment Viropharma decided to go after the Common Cold patient population, I knew it was doomed.
The only way something like this could ever pass, is if they defined the drug's indications to be a more dangerous member of the Picornavirus, affecting a much smaller population. Like Enterovirus D68 post-exposure prophylaxis in a child, Poliovirus post-exposure prophylaxis in a non-immune patient, or something like Fulminant Hepatitis A or post-exposure prophyaxis in a non-immunized patient. They didn't understand the politics of drug approval, and so they got squashed. And so it is too late now.
I don't think the FDA holds much sway in the UK where the research is being done.
How do you study something for 30 years with no success but still stay positive (and not just kill yourself)? And how do you still get paid? '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."'
Yeah, corporations would just *hate* to make money off of this, and they just love it when their employees take sick days. /s
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
You made absolutely no argument there. Some points were made, but you didn't address them at all.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
No, no it's not. Don't even pretend for a second that you are so dense that you don't realize that money isn't commonly used to put a value on friends and family. Sure, I've seen it done, but that alone put a lie to your money exists because people couldn't assign value to things before.
You are conflating value of life with risk of loss of life, and several other concepts as well apparently.
In some senses it is less accurate, in some senses more. It all depends on what you are attempting to measure. But most of the thread is conflating different issues, like value to a company, risk of loss of life, friendship, lifespan, and quality of life, nonexhaustive.
It's not all the people that make medecine, it's the people who makes the decision...
I find it a lot cheaper to buy homeopathic remedies at the grocery store. Look for those gallon jugs of "distilled water", which are generic versions of all homeopathic remedies simultaneously.
Also, I take issue with your statement that homeopathic remedies are as good as spiritual energy. I don't absolutely know that there is no such thing as spiritual energy, or that, if it existed, it would have no medical effects.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes