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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
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.
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.
"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"
Correlation is not causation.
Zinc has no known effect on colds.
No sig today...
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.