Observations on viruses
The report from the Common Cold Centre in Cardiff that we may be more likely to catch a cold if we are actually cold may sound obvious, but it could amount to a minor medical breakthrough. It is only 40 years, after all, since the best wisdom available in the country that is so much a martyr to the tiresome condition was this: "As to why we get more colds in the winter, we must at present admit that we just do not know."
Those were the words of Sir Christopher Andrewes, in his day almost a celebrity scientist thanks to his years of study at the wonderful Common Cold Research Unit, the collection of Nissen huts near Salisbury that represented the cutting edge of postwar work in the field.
Andrewes took an amiable delight in putting volunteers through unpleasant ordeals in pursuit of the truth about the habits of the rhinovirus, as the cold carrier is properly known. (And perversely they came back for more until they had to be turned away.) In one instance, he employed 18 volunteers. Six received a dose of the virus up the nose and were then left alone to read their novels in the huts. Six more were required to take baths and then "stand about in bathing attire, undried, in a cool corridor for as long as they could stand it. Then they were allowed to dress but still wore wet socks for some hours." The final six had both the virus and the cool corridor/wet socks treatment.
What did he learn? In an all too common conclusion at the research centre, he had to declare: "There was no statistical significance in the number who caught colds."
The work owed its origins, at least in part, to a paradox observed during the First World War, when troops in the cold, wet trenches proved less, not more, prone to colds than those who were snug behind the lines in warm billets. This flew in the face of received wisdom of the kind that anyone who has read Jane Austen will recognise, and which was summed up by the Victorian physician W T Fernie in 1890. The usual cause of a common cold, Fernie wrote, "is a chill sustained by the skin, or attacking the nose and throat, from some vicissitude of our climate or from some injudicious exposure to harmful cold and wet".
Andrewes deduced that the reason for the curious wartime findings was that stuffy, crowded billets provided excellent conditions for transmitting the virus, and that in general human contact was the key to the spread of the disease. He was never able to pin down a link between the ailment and the temperature.
Now, thanks to experiments involving 90 volunteers, some of whom had to sit with their feet in iced water for 20 minutes, the Cardiff team have shone light in this darkness, and they do not really contradict Andrewes, nor do they really endorse the grannies who were so keen for us to wrap up warm. Low temperature, it seems, does not cause colds, but may help a dormant infection take hold.
Even the Cardiff people, however, were unable to prove a link with those feet in the basins of icy water, since it may be that merely having a cold nose makes the difference.
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