What I Require From Life by Dronamraju Krishna;

Author:Dronamraju, Krishna;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2012-04-09T04:00:00+00:00

31

The common cold

THIS is the worst season of the year for common colds. From one to three or more times a winter, most of us are inefficient for several days as a result of this infection. In normal times the most public-spirited thing to do if you had a cold was to knock off work, so as not to affect your mates. At present I think we are supposed to stay at work and trap the germs in our handkerchiefs. The Lancet recommends us to wear a pad over our noses and mouths for three days, but it is not so easy to get the material.

There is no doubt that a ‘cold’ is due to infection. This has been shown in a great many ways. Careful studies have been made in small islands where no one has had a cold for many months until a ship arrived, and then it has gone round the whole population. The agent is too small to be seen even with a microscope, for colds have been given, both to men and apes, by filtrates of nasal secretions which had passed through a filter so fine as to stop all bacteria. Apes get our colds, and get them very badly. The glass screens between us and them in the Zoo are to protect them from our airborne diseases, including tuberculosis, but particularly colds.

While a virus is one cause of colds, it is not the only cause. The weather is somehow concerned, which is why colds almost disappear in summer. But it is not the main cause. Arctic explorers never get colds, until they come back to ‘civilization’ and get real bad ones.

Nobody knows where the virus of the common cold spends the summer. Even in warm weather there may be enough people with colds to keep it going. Perhaps a few people can carry it without showing any symptoms. Until this is known there is no prospect of wiping out colds.

Attempts to prevent them with vaccines, serum, and so on, have been a failure, or at least have not been very successful. An English professor injected half his medical students with a vaccine which was supposed to be prophylactic. He asked them if it had done them good, and the majority said yes. But he also made them keep diaries of their colds, and found that they got just as many, and as bad ones, as the untreated half. Other workers have of course claimed better results.

Colds can probably be cured with some of the new drugs related to sulphanilamide. But these are dangerous substances, and can cause illness far worse than a cold. The risk is worth taking in the case of blood poisoning, pneumonia, or gonorrhoea; it is emphatically not worth taking for a cold.

However, a very great deal can be done for a cold with ephedrine. This drug is derived from a root which has been used in China for a long time under the name of Ma Huang, Ephedra being the scientific name for the plant.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.