COLD COMFORT

Mother always said don’t sit around with wet feet or you’ll catch cold. If you got one, she’d make you drink lots of water and maybe a lot of orange juice. She’d put drops in your nose, make you gargle, and maybe stick a mustard plaster on your chest. For some, chicken soup is still supposed to be a cure-all. Dozens of patent drugs promise you relief. You are supposed to keep clear of other people, so as not to pass it on. And you certainly shouldn’t kiss anyone while you were infectious. Still, the saying has always been that the cold would last two weeks – or 14 days if you gave it plenty of treatment.

It turns out that the old saying may be right and all those precautions and therapies bunk. The New Yorker, in its March 11 issue, reviews research into the common cold over the past 50 years and comes up with conclusions that must jolt most people and may surprise even the doctors.

A 1931 research project studied the residents of a small isolated town on Spitsbergen, an island midway between the north coast of Norway and the North Pole. Hardly any of the townspeople caught a cold all winter, but most of them soon came down with the sniffles after the first boat arrived in the spring. They must have caught cold from the spring visitors. Yet none of the victims had come into contact with the one person on that first boat who had a cold.

In other tests, infectious people tried their best to spread their colds to healthy subjects, by coughing and sneezing at them, shaking hands with them, and even kissing them on the mouth. (The kisses lasted 60 seconds but were otherwise not described.) That effort mostly failed, too. Cold showers and sitting around in sopping clothes wouldn’t bring on a cold, either.

Protective efforts, however, failed to stop the spread of colds. Researchers tried various drugs, heavy doses of vitamin C, isolation rooms, repeated hand washing and almost everything else imaginable. All to no avail. Same for most attempts to shorten the duration of colds, although some new prescription drugs may shorten certain colds by a day or two if administered the very first day. One researcher treats himself by taking ibuprofen and one of the older antihistamines for a week. He says it makes him feel better – but not much. Research continues. The best the scientists have done about the spread of colds is to show by dye tests and ultra-violet light that cold viruses are everywhere – on hands and arms and faces, on dish ware, on tables, on stair railings and doorknobs, and can survive as long as three hours.

Once you catch a cold, the researchers say you can forget about drinking a lot of water or trying various cold remedies or taking zinc or herbal products. You might try chicken soup, however. It couldn’t hurt.