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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!
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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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Careful. Homeopathic medicine can kill you if you don't take it.
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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.
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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.
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.
Food poisoning. Actually, aside from long-term illnesses like the flu, that's what most of my legitimate sick days have been for. (Legitimate at an earlier job. My later employers just said we get 10 "personal" days each year to use if we're sick or just need the day off. That policy also eliminates the incongruity of people who got sick more getting paid more per day worked, and encourages people to stay healthy so they can use those "sick" days as extra vacation days instead.)
> 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.
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...
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.
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.