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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."

9 of 193 comments (clear)

  1. About to be excited by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Until I saw TFA is from the DailyMail

  2. "Sick" days by NotInHere · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  3. Re:It works by sheramil · · Score: 5, Funny

    I tried it and it works. As a side effect it causes your nose to fall off.

    So, how does it smell? It Sphinx!

  4. Re:not likely by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    The start of the Mallpox Season was yesterday- Black Friday.
    There is no cure.

  5. Is balanced by bigbang137 · · Score: 4, Insightful

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

  6. Re:File under Bullsh*t by ArmoredDragon · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

  7. Re:File under Bullsh*t by mwvdlee · · Score: 5, Funny

    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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  8. Re:File under Bullsh*t by Pikoro · · Score: 4, Funny

    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"
  9. Re:Sickdays==Lossofprofits, can't have those! by Paul+Carver · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.