HEALTH & SCIENCE

Cracking the cold case: Not an easy task

Physicians have long struggled to cure, prevent or, at the very least, ameliorate the common cold. But an absolute solution seems as distant as ever.

By Victoria Stagg Elliott, AMNews staff. Feb. 7, 2005.

When pediatrician Howard Markel, MD, PhD, sees a young patient with a cold, parents often expect him to offer up a cure for what ails the child -- a pill, syrup or some other pharmaceutical treatment.

This expectation, of course, is due in part to years of periodic headlines, all of which promise that a cold cure is finally in sight.

"It's something we talk about every year as being just around the corner, but that corner seems to be the farthest corner in the world," said Dr. Markel, who is also director of the Center for the History of Medicine at the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor.

The truth is that the challenge of curing something so basic and, well, common has proven to be more complex than researchers ever imagined when they first started discovering various cold viruses in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Initially, the strategy was to hunt for a vaccine to offer widespread protection. The realization that hundreds of viruses -- rhinoviruses, coronaviruses, adenoviruses and others -- were the guilty culprits, though, led them to abandon the approach.

"It became obvious that it would not be possible to make a vaccine," said Jack Gwaltney Jr., MD, professor emeritus in internal medicine at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, Charlottesville, a center for much of the research done in this area. During his more than 40-year career at the university, he took part in many of the common cold discoveries that are now taken for granted, such as its transmission by hand-to-hand contact.

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