Cold Vaccine? No

A score of the nation's top virus researchers put their heads together in Manhattan last week and collectively bemoaned the fact that they still can offer no preventive and no cure for the commonest of civilized man's ills, the common cold. All they could prescribe for sniffling humanity was hope.

Western Reserve University's Dr. John Dingle told the meeting, called by the Common Cold Foundation, all about the researchers' failures, then added: "However, I am confident that we will find the solution to the problem, probably within the next five years." But he dashed hopes for a common-cold vaccine. Since a cold, unlike other virus diseases, e.g., measles, yellow fever, polio, confers only the briefest immunity against reinfection, there seems little chance that an effective vaccine can be prepared. Dr. Dingle's best bet: a drug, still to be discovered, that will knock out the elusive common-cold virus.

The man who has done most in recent years to promote immunization by vaccination was constrained to agree. Said Harvard University's craggy Dr. John F. Enders, Nobel Prizewinner for work that led to the polio vaccine: "It may not be possible to prepare an effective vaccine. It seems to me. too. more likely that an antiviral compound will be discovered."

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