The Secret Life of the Common Cold

By Frank Trippett

"Do you know what it is to succumb to an insurmountable day mare--a whoresome lethargy--an indisposition to do anything--a total deadness and distaste--a suspension of vitality--an indifference to locality--a numb soporifical goodfornothingness--an ossification all over--an oyster-like insensibility to the passing events--a mind stupor--a brawny defiance to the needles of a thrusting-in conscience?"

Charles Lamb groaned forth that question in the 19th century, but anybody in any epoch ought to be able to answer it with a simple yes. Anybody, that is, who has ever had a cold.

Even people who have never had a cold, if any there be, are pretty likely to know something about the peculiar miseries of the ailment. After all, nobody old enough to understand talk could easily avoid all knowledge of the cold: it is one disease that has never been discussed in whispers.

Quite the contrary. People, even when hoarse, tend to discourse clearly and repetitiously about the common cold. Cold victims routinely elucidate their suffering; those who are ordinarily laconic grow voluble, and the normally gabby become windy, lugubrious. With or without colds, people eagerly pass around whatever they possess of society's huge accumulation of folklore on the subject. (Benjamin Franklin was an archetypal expert on avoiding colds:

convinced that fresh air would do the job, Franklin once explained his theory so thoroughly to John Adams that he put the future President to sleep.) There are certain cold sufferers, true, who snuffle around telling everybody that the affliction is not as bad as it is cracked up to be, but their stoicism does not require them to talk any less about it.

As the new cold season now arriving will demonstrate, almost nobody suffers the common cold in silence. Yet very little can usefully be said on the subject, because the common cold remains a little black hole of a disease, ultimately obscure and myth-ridden. Science, to be sure, has learned a good deal about the cold. One unsettling modern discovery is that the invisible nature of the ailment is amazingly varied.

The common cold is in fact caused by 200 or so distinct viruses.

Medical science, of course, has not mastered the knack of immunizing against any of them. So the state of the art of cold prevention can be boiled down to a very few words based on the discovery that colds are transmitted person to person, most often by hand. The best, still imperfect cold avoidance program thus consists of washing the hands frequently when colds are about and keeping the hands away from the nose and eyes. The state of the art of curing the cold is simpler still: there is no cure. The adage holds: with proper treatment a cold can be ended in seven days, but otherwise it lasts a week.

The paucity of verified knowledge about colds could never deduced by anybody studying a typical cold season. Mere 'acts about the disease usually vanish into persisting clouds of folklore. The belief that dampness, chilliness and drafts cause colds, though debunked repeatedly in controlled experiments is still widely held--and energetically perpetuated by parents in cautioning children. "Don't get your feet wet, you'll catch cold." Even though medical research has long since shown that neither antihistamines nor any other medication can change the course of a cold, Americans spend some $1 billion a year on untold thousands of over-the-counter cold products.

Then there are the folk remedies. These are also beyond numbering, but include traditional notables like hot toddy, hot lemonade, chicken broth, regional potions like the South's horehound and pine-needle tea, and ethnic preparations featuring ingredients like honey, garlic and cayenne. Faith is widespread in the anticold potency of herbs like eucalyptus, mullein leaves, bloodroot and red clover. California Herb Specialist Michael Tierra commends a concoction of honeysuckle, chrysanthemum and licorice.

Perhaps the most popular new folk remedy of modern times is ascorbic acid, a.k.a. vitamin C. Ever since Nobel-Prizewinning Chemist Linus Pauling popularized this remedy in the 1970 book Vitamin C and the Common Cold, many people have become convinced that big doses of ascorbic acid help ward off or ameliorate colds; controlled experiments, however, have failed "to provide proof of the claim. Some folk remedies out of folklore (rub socks with onions, coat body with Vaseline) are hard to consider with a straight face, and a great many others irresistibly bring to mind Robert Benchley's personal anticold regimen: "Don't breathe through your nose or mouth."

It is easy to understand pre-Copernican beliefs in a flat earth and similarly easy to account for the accumulation of popular myths about the cold before the disease's viral nature became clear. But why do so many dubious beliefs persist in the face of new knowledge? The inertia of human prejudices is only part of the answer. An additional reason lies in the truth that a cold, typically, is far more than a mere medical event.

Were it only that, the public would deal with the cold with far less conversation, far less drama, and the cold sufferer would never have become one of the cartoonist's regular stock of sympathetic (and pathetic) figures. The fact is that over the generations the cold has grown to be, along with all else, a theatrical event, a psychological event, a social event--all transactions that would be undermined if people laid aside myths and paid too close attention to scientific truth.

The common cold's theatricality is so obvious that one can classify the styles of cold suffering by labeling the roles that get played: the hero (who insists on coming to work), the martyr (who cannot afford not to come to work), the opportunist (who would not dream of staying away from work for less than a week). To specialists like Robert H. Waldman, chairman of the department of medicine at the West Virginia University School of Medicine, the cold as psychological event seems almost as clear. Waldman points out that the cold allows the typical adult to retreat from everyday pressures, adding: "If we did away with it--if we cured the common cold--we might well have to face an increase in hypertension, depression and related problems." Nobody who has either received or poured forth the human sympathy that a good cold provokes can fail to be convinced that one of the disease's fortunate aspects is entirely social.

Given the cost of colds, as well as the outright danger they represent when they attack somebody who is otherwise seriously ailing, the search for a way to prevent them must go on. But everybody should be forewarned that if the search ever succeeds the cold will be missed in more ways than one.

--By Frank Trippett

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.