Why can’t we cure the common cold?

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/oct/06/why-cant-we-cure-the-common-cold?utm_source=pocket&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pockethits

by elorant • 9 years ago

92 95 9 years ago

theguardian.com

zeristor• 9 years ago

"Scientists today identify seven virus families that cause the majority of colds: rhinovirus, coronavirus, influenza and parainfluenza virus, adenovirus, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and, finally, metapneumovirus, which was first isolated in 2001."

maga5• 9 years ago

... experiments have shown that low temperature neither increases the likelihood of catching a cold, nor the severity of symptoms.
Adults suffer an average of between two and four colds each year, and children up to 10, and we have come to accept this as an inevitable part of life.

I live in Europe and go through one or two flu seasons a year on average. I don't recall catching cold/flu ever since I started using cold water exclusive year-round, as I wrote previously[1]. I was pessimistic about this practice at the beginning, and truth be told this enhanced immune system is the only benefit I'd attribute to cold showers, yet there it is, no cold for quite a few winters despite people around me getting it on schedule.

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8808859

interfixus• 9 years ago

Mileages vary. I indulge in hot showers - and full blast heating in winters. I haven't had a cold or any other infectious malaise since 2004. I am also in Europe.

Mind you, I am probably more mindful about disease vectors than most. Avoid shopping-trolleys and -baskets, keep my fingers clear of mouth, nose, and eyes at all unwashed times.

maga5• 9 years ago

I agree, avoiding catching it is a better strategy than putting the immune system to test every time.

I didn't do much to avoid it, though, a few times I even had to nurse close ones through their colds fully expecting to catch it from them, yet nothing.

Kluny3• 9 years ago

I got a similar result from quitting dairy, for a couple years at least, but correlation =/= causation.

maga5• 9 years ago

Absolutely! The correlation is strong in my case, though, I was on alert waiting to get cold for quite some time at first, and I also didn't change anything else in my routines at the time, so I attributed the results to cold showers. I must say that I didn't notice other benefits that people expect from the practice: no weight loss, no boost in testosterone, etc.

amelius3• 9 years ago

A few years back, I tried finishing my showers with a minute of cold water. But after a few days I got a cold, and I'm not normally very susceptible to the cold. My experiment stopped there. Perhaps I should try it again.

maga5• 9 years ago

Try gradually lowering the temperature of your water over say a month or two. What helped me, perhaps, is that I started during hot summer and the tap water got cold gradually till winter allowing me to adopt to it.

albertzeyer• 9 years ago

Well, that's an anecdote, and so maybe I add mine: Whenever I go more frequently to the sauna (e.g. like 2-3 times per week), and do more sport (like about 7-10h/week), I don't really feel ill at all, for years. When I reduced it (no sauna at all anymore, maybe only sport for 3-5h/week), what I did 3 years ago or so for a few month, I got a mild cold soon after.

But not sure how useful such anecdotes are. My memories are also not perfect. It depends on many factors, such as age, your immune system condition, stress, general health, etc.

dingaling• 9 years ago

I've been doing cold showers year-round outdoors for two years and for the past three days have been laid-up in bed with a cold.

patall3• 9 years ago

Interesting read. Unfortunately it then comes to a sentence like this:

"For his PhD on asthma, Johnston developed a technique called polymerase chain reaction, which magnifies DNA so that viruses can be identified more precisely."

which make me not sure what to believe: Is that bad spelling or has the author not even basic knowledge of modern biology?

hanniabu• 9 years ago

I'm not well educated as I have no idea what you're referring to, mind pointing out what in specific was misspelled or not correct.

danieltillett11• 9 years ago

The problem with the quote is Jonston neither invented the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) nor are most cold viruses DNA viruses (most are RNA).

sametmax• 9 years ago

I've always wondered if the common cold is not something that we just need from time to time. I mean, it seems so universal, and the reasons we catch it so random sometime it seems like the body just decide "ok let that in".

guilhas• 9 years ago

Agreed, like a mostly harmless disease that we get occasionally to keep our defense mechanisms working and ready for possible worse problems. Like a natural health check up.

ssl232• 9 years ago

So a promising treatment for the cold was dropped by the drug company because it was too expensive to develop, and the potential payoff too small. Drug companies' profit models pretty much require them to focus on developing drugs that people have to use for the rest of their lives - that manage a condition rather than treat it.

Is there a good reason why we shouldn't club together as rich countries and fund a not-for-profit drug research body that does fund this sort of thing?

JumpCrisscross4• 9 years ago

Drug companies want to make drugs that people have to use for the rest of their lives - that manage a condition rather than treat it

Recent evidence contradicts this statement. Notably, the pay-off to Gilead for its hepatitis C cure [1].

Besides, TFA outlines non-conspiratorial reasons underlying pharmaceutical companies’ nervousnous around developing vaccines. (TL; DR people are unwilling to pay as much for prevention as they are for a cure; also development is expensive and risky.)

EDIT: [1] https://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/02/04/business/sales-of-sova...

danieltillett11• 9 years ago

Do you think insurance companies are going to be willing to pay $100K per person to cure the common cold?

benmarks• 9 years ago

“Yescarta and Kymriah do work similarly, though. Each involves removing a patient's T-cells and shipping them to a facility where they're engineered to spot and bind to CD19, a protein commonly expressed by B-cell cancers. Once the companies have finished altering the T-cells, they're infused back into the patient.”

This seems to be quite an outlier in a discussion on general vaccine economics.

seszett• 9 years ago

Is there a good reason why we shouldn't club together as rich countries and fund a not-for-profit drug research body that does fund this sort of thing?

Oh yes. Most of the people that would be involved in this decision are linked near of far to the drug companies.

danieltillett11• 9 years ago

The problem is not the profit motive, it is the regulations. We demand such safety and so much data of pharmaceutical companies that it is basically impossible to make a vaccine for a disease like the common cold.

If we are willing to take more risks and require less paperwork we could have a vaccine for the common cold in a few years.

claudius2• 9 years ago

We could also have lots and lots of deformed and/or dead babies then. There’s a reason these regulations exist and are updated often to keep up with current best practices.

patall3• 9 years ago

As far as I understand, the main reason for this is that you would need to invest a billion dollar. You might have success with that but you also may not and then there a lot of other nice things you can do with a billion dollar. Governmental research projects have the tendency to go on even after everyone knows that they will fail, so money would be saved by doing them in the private sector where investors stop a failed project sooner. Unfortunately, if the backbone of the therapy has been developed in the 60s and 70s most patents have run out so there is nothing that would return most investments. The only one I could imagine doing this would be a private philantropist like the Gates Foundation.

Grue3• 9 years ago

Potential payoff for treating the single most common illness in the world is too small? I don't buy it. The first company to come up with the cure would be sitting on a goldmine.

senectus1• 9 years ago

the first company to be willing to disrupt the industry by offering it cheap to mega corps that want their productivity up will be rich.

We need a Big Pharma version of Elon Musk.

mft_5• 9 years ago

Drug companies' profit models pretty much require them to focus on developing drugs that people have to use for the rest of their lives - that manage a condition rather than treat it.

Not true - there are plenty of examples of genuine cures developed and marketed by pharma.

What drug companies do require is a return on their investment, which can be in the multiple-billions. This isn't evil-big-pharma stuff... this is just how any sensibly-run company operates, pharma or otherwise.

Achieving an ROI is seen as difficult in this particular case because (as TFA says) people don't value vaccines highly enough because they are taken when they're well, and (as you say) they're only needed once.

(Personally, I think the article over-estimates this challenge; sell 100m doses at $50/dose and [assuming CoG is not a problem] you've got a major blockbuster. Even if the NHS/insurers didn't want to pay, employers and individuals likely would, at this price level. And 100m doses is pretty low-ball, if you consider the likely uptake of a vaccine promising a genuine cure for the commonest cause of the common cold.)

Is there a good reason why we shouldn't club together as rich countries and fund a not-for-profit drug research body that does fund this sort of thing?

I've wondered about this in the past. I think a major aspect is risk.

If it was easy to pick a disease to cure and a way to do it, then we'd not be in this situation in the first place - developing drugs is actually incredibly difficult and unpredictable. This is well-demonstrated by an analysis published in Forbes a few years ago. https://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2013/08/11/the-co...

Rather than taking an individual drug and pricing the work done on it to bring it to market (as with many previous studies) this analysis looks at total R&D spend by individual pharma companies over time, and divided that spend by the number of new drugs brought to market. As such, it takes into account the extraordinarily high rate of attrition in drug development - the time and money spent on countless thousands of drug candidates that are abandoned before the ever make it to market. (Note the analysis does have one major weakness, but now's not the time.)

To quote the article: "For companies that have launched more than three drugs, the median cost per new drug is $4.2 billion; for those that have launched more than four, it is $5.3 billion."

And there's the rub: I'm sure you could find some way of funding a few hundred million if it was guaranteed to result in a cure for a disease - Governments, the Gates Foundation, etc. But do such bodies genuinely have the will to spend countless billions, every year, to chase those few new treatments that might --or might not-- emerge? And having found a new treatment, would they just give it away... or would they want to recoup some of the costs they'd invested?

nonbel2• 9 years ago

"there are plenty of examples of genuine cures developed and marketed by pharma."

Name one.

caf• 9 years ago

The influenza vaccine has to be administered every year, and employers & individuals do choose to pay for it.

sleavey• 9 years ago

I guess my statement that drug companies are only interested in long term treatments was a bit sensational, but as we both agree, they need a return on their investment. I understand that developing drugs is both intellectually hard and extremely expensive, but there are in my view a few benefits that (super)national collaborations have over private companies:

- you only need one cure, so the work only needs to be done successfully once (competition is in this case potentially wasteful)

- knowledge and good people are pooled (not hoarded by the companies able to offer the best compensation)

- access to larger sources of funding for individual projects

- knowledge from failed projects could be publicly disseminated instead of locked up in the company's archives

- no need to turn a profit

The usual arguments I hear against state- or superstate-run organisations over the private sector is, as others have said here, the perceived wastes of resources when projects don't appear to be on a successful track: a private company would cancel early to avoid more waste, whereas a publicly funded organisation wouldn't necessarily do so as the project managers aren't incentivised by shareholder value. However, it seems to be to be just a case of having the right incentives. If they were instead tasked with improving patient outcomes measured over, I don't know, 10 years, then that could be a valid reason to use to cancel research that doesn't seem to be going anywhere ("it doesn't seem like this drug, even if it passes trials, will make a meaningful improvement in patient outcomes"). Another aspect of public organisations could be that the scientists in charge of the research would have their own reputation to consider, instead of that of the company. It would be in their own interest for costly projects to fail quickly if they go nowhere.

Here's a thought: would it work if such a public organisation could underwrite the research of private drug companies? These companies could then be paid a "non finders fee" for failed drug projects that nevertheless showed significant promise, in return for low-cost access to the successful ones, and of course public sharing of the reasons why the drug failed. Would the economics of such a system work, or would drug companies find ways to game the system?

dominotw• 9 years ago

and the potential payoff too small.

I don't want to put some chemicals in my body for cold. I would imagine that to be case for many people.

chillacy• 9 years ago

I think the fact that there's an entire aisle in the grocery store for tylenol/ibuprophen, mucinex, robotussin, and other cold-related products is a good hint that a sufficient number of people will seek chemical solutions.

Feniks2• 9 years ago

Is there a good reason why we shouldn't club together as rich countries and fund a not-for-profit drug research body that does fund this sort of thing?

This already happens with major threats, there was Ebola that got solved quickly. Keep in mind that government resources are also limited.

danieltillett11• 9 years ago

The most important thing from this whole article is that the brute force approach works. Just make a vaccine against all the different common cold viruses (250 to 300) and vaccinate everyone. Done.

Of course this will never be done because the system for developing vaccines is so broken that it is impossible to make money selling a vaccine for the common cold. You could make a magic vaccine that was 100% effect with zero side effects (no vaccine is magic) and it would be impossible to develop and sell under the current regulations.

polskibus• 9 years ago

Ca you elaborate why would it be impossible to develop and sell under the regulations?

danieltillett11• 9 years ago

Basically it is impossible to prove the vaccine is safe enough to give to the general population for a disease that is not normally lethal. By the time you had finished the studies to the satisfaction of the FDA your patent would have expired and each vaccine would need to cost $100K per person to pay back the development costs.

If pharmaceutical companies thought there was a fortune to be made curing the common cold they would be doing it.

tempestn2• 9 years ago

You're overstating it a bit. The difficulty of making money from it does sound like the reason we don't have such a vaccine _already_, but someday we will. The question will be whether we're still around to enjoy it.

danieltillett11• 9 years ago

What makes you think that the regulations that prevent the development of a vaccine today are suddenly going to go away and allow it in the future? The reason we don't have a vaccine has nothing to do with science and everything to do with regulations and economics.

smn1234• 9 years ago

Hows about all the improved efficiencies _can be had_ in the workplace from folks not getting sick at least once every year and having to take time off or not being as focused / engaged on their job function?

dubhrosa2• 9 years ago

Perhaps a government will step in and fund a program to develop the vaccines. As a propaganda coup, it would give the kind of bragging rights that China or Russia would seem to crave (or N Korea...)

hannob• 9 years ago

The frustrating thought I had when reading this article:

If we'd spend all the money that people spend on OTC cold remedies that almost certainly don't work on developing a vaccine we probably could have one soon.

eric_h• 9 years ago

OTC cold remedies do not cure your cold, but they certainly do work by treating the symptoms. Ever taken an airplane with congested sinuses without taking a decongestant?

TheCoelacanth• 9 years ago

The palliatives do work, but there are a lot of things that claim to actually shorten the duration of a cold, e.g. Zicam, Cold-EEZE that have little to no evidence that they work.

tcj_phx• 9 years ago

What if our approach to viruses is basically-wrong?

I grew up before children were vaccinated against chicken pox. When I was about 5-6 years old, I had a case... Mom counted 12 pox, which was enough to assume that I'd be immune for the rest of my life.

Some children are covered with chickenpox... Heard a story of someone who scratched their eye out. The mother of six children told me her oldest had a horrible case, but her subsequent children each had a less-severe case than the previous.

One theory is that winter diseases stem from decreased sunlight... Less ultraviolet light -> less vitamin D. Red light is also important. A few years ago there was an outbreak of chickenpox amongst some baseball players who came from Central America, where chickenpox is not a problem.

On account of my experience with chickenpox, and the institution of mass vaccination of children & adults against the horrible chickenpox virus (99.99% survivable)... Shouldn't we be looking at what makes people vulnerable to colds? Virus exposure might not actually be important. From the article:

In 1984, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison decided to investigate one of the best-known ways of catching a cold. They infected volunteers with a cold virus and instructed them to kiss healthy test subjects on the mouth for at least one minute. (The instruction for participants was to use whichever technique was “most natural”.) Sixteen healthy volunteers were kissed by people with colds. The result: just one confirmed infection. (emphasis added)

I heard of an investigation in Central America that found providing clean water, outhouses, and basic nutrients was the most important public health intervention that could be done for a village.

hennsen8• 9 years ago

What the article says nothing about is the usefulness of taking Vitamin C in high doses - it only mentions shortly regular doses probably something like 100-200mg a day. This is enough to prevent Skorbut an ensures basic need.

But there are studies that high doses can help a lot with colds.

EDIT:

examples:

http://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/9/4/339

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-03/uoh-ldo03301...

https://www.consumeraffairs.com/news/high-doses-of-vitamin-c...

After reading about it i tried this, and confirm that high doses help to cure colds much faster. In 2 of three cases i managed to get over a cold which otherwise lasts 7-10 days for me in just 3-4 days with much lower symptoms. The dose at which this begins to work is 3g (yes 3000mg!) per day - i take 6x1g the first day, then 3g/day a few days more. Pure Vitamin C powder with no other additives(many products nowadays are combinations, in spain where i am right now, the pure powder is hard to get, in Germany it’s in every drugstore). It works even better with herpes i sometimes get on the lips. Here, the success rate of making the illness last 2-3 days instead of 10 is 100% since i started do treat it that way a few years ago, with much less symptoms, just a little itching, no big wounds for many days like many suffer from (and i did) when getting a herpes push.

I can clearly understand why this is not researched and communicated much - a pot of 100g Vitamin C powder, good for about 5 such treatments costs just 3€ ... not much money to be made.

EDIT:

This is my personal experience - for which I don't claim general applicability for everyone. But I find it very interesting that some people see the urgent need to downvote a post where someone reports personal experience, without saying it must be generally applicable.

amelius3• 9 years ago

Even better is vitamin C + zinc.

hennsen8• 9 years ago

Might be for some / in some situations. My „experiments“ worked without zinc so far. But maybe i should try it next time and see if it helps to get a success rate closer to 100 instead of just ~70%

The thing is as with Vitamin C, most supermarket products just have low doses. So to get an effect i recommend getting pure and high dosed preparates of both, each by itself.

dubhrosa2• 9 years ago

For herpes simplex on the lips try a large dose of L-Lysine (6mg or more on day 1, followed by 2mg a day for a week), in all cases over the past 5 years for me this completely prevents the blisters and sore developing.

astura• 9 years ago

Yeah, and I've found L-Lysine does jack shit for my cold sores.

rwmj• 9 years ago

This has been debunked extensively, eg: http://www.yalescientific.org/2015/03/mythbusters-does-vitam... https://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/pauling.h...

hennsen8• 9 years ago

Oh really - It has been proven that it does not work for me personally exactly as i wrote?

I didn’t see the researcher team coming through my door...

I didn’t say it works for everyone, but only report how it turns out for me.

Interesting that some find a personal report enough reason to downvote...

How do we know the research you point at is not sponsored by those with an interest in selling more expensive stuff?

hennsen8• 9 years ago

The yale article doesn't mention the exact doses for which it has been tested, only once it says "high", but in the other experiments just says "supplements" - so it's unclear what exactly has been found out about exactly the doses I wrote about.

The other talks about 1g daily as prevention. I talk about 3x1g as treatment when symptoms start to appear until they are gone.

Different things.

And again, I don't say my own experience is a scientificly proven thing working generally, just a personal report and maybe a thing worth trying for the curious instead of throwing a lot of bucks in other treatments.

I think theres a lot of (financial) interest in suppressing that the thing I wrote about works for more than just me - and there's not much to be gained for me personally if writing about this will help others too... so, what's your motivation trying to supress me in reporting my experience?

majkinetor2• 9 years ago

That 'debunking' is silly really, as mentioned studies used radically lower doses (even that is understatement).

Anyway, I never had common cold since I started following Pauling protocol (more precisely, never longer then a single day of mild discomfort). Its 10 years now. Taking 5-10g daily and when I sense it coming doing bowel tolerance which usually ends up somewhere between 20-50g. Before I started doing this I had it 3-5 times a year lasting usually 2 weeks.

It works equally effective for my daughter.

Keep in mind that you need to be on lowish carb if you want C to be effective due to the fact that one of the transporters (GLUT4) is shared with glucose. Timing is also crucial, taking it to late and it doesn't help much, it must be started on first signs of illness.

I wonder why people love to hate vitamin C vs common cold that much given that C is cheaper then water, you don't have side effects and the worst thing that can happen is that it will not do anything for you. Comparably, nobody hates 8 glasses of water per day even tho there is 0 proof that you should do more then your body asks of you. Because, you know... its just water.

One of the things that people often forget is that even if C does not stop common cold, it sure as hell makes complications less probable. Some of those can turn to chronic disease, such as arthritis.

Eridrus2• 9 years ago

Sixteen healthy volunteers were kissed by people with colds. The result: just one confirmed infection.

This doesn't sound like a debunking of what people think at all. If the chance of getting infected from a kissing for a minute is 6%, and you spend a week around an infected person and you kiss them repeatedly, you will almost certainly get sick with that infection rate.

wink• 9 years ago

To deduct a general 6% infectionrate because 1 person got infected by 1 other person is kind of not what I believe.

People's immune systems are so different... before I believe that I'd want to see every sick person kissing every healthy person or something. I don't even know how that would work with incubation times. Lock people away and just allow contact every 2 days for 3 weeks? But then all the sick people would probably be healthy again already.

My head explodes just trying to think about this kind of trial, mixed with statistics :P

Eridrus2• 9 years ago

To deduct a general 6% infectionrate because 1 person got infected by 1 other person is kind of not what I believe.

Sure, I'm just saying this was not a very strong result in terms of disproving the fact that kissing doesn't spread cold viruses.

Feniks2• 9 years ago

Viruses laugh at man's feeble attempts to eradicate them.

They will adept. And possibly give you more than a runny nose.

eip• 9 years ago

http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v05n07.shtml

Why can’t we cure the common cold?

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