Common Cold: New Attack

From a patient and hardheaded Scot last week came news of a revolutionary new attack on the common cold. For a quarter-century or more, physicians have been virtually unanimous in believing that colds are caused by viruses, but these are so maddeningly elusive that no consistently effective vaccine has yet been made.* Also, since there are no specific cures for most viral diseases, the only thing to do for their victims is to treat the symptoms.

Nobody held these orthodox views more firmly than Dr. James Morrison Ritchie, director of the Public Health Laboratory in Birkenhead (pop. 143,000), a grimy seaport and shipbuilding center on England's west coast. But against his will and judgment, Dr. Ritchie got involved in experiments that ran counter to all accepted theory. In Britain's Lancet, he tentatively reports success in two highly unorthodox attacks on the common cold --with vaccines and antibiotics, working not against viruses but against the bacteria which are always present in the throat and nasal passages.

"Och, Weel." Dr. Ritchie's research started in the early 19305, when clerks in his health department pestered him for a vaccine against their recurrent colds. Glasgow-born Dr. Ritchie harrumphed that he would have no truck with such nonsense. But, says he: "One woman kept nattering at me so long that eventually I said 'Och, weel.' and decided to give her a vaccine to keep her quiet." He had a vaccine prepared from her saliva, told her it was being given only to prove its uselessness. Yet on weekly injections all one winter, she had no cold. Coincidence, snorted the scientifically cautious doctor. Repeat tests with other pesky patients did not shake Dr. Ritchie until he had run up a score of 60 or 70 over 20 years. Then he began to think there might be something to the vaccines, after all.

From employees of Lever Bros, he drew volunteers, some to receive a vaccine, others to get only an inert substance for comparison. Dr. Ritchie wasted no time chasing the will-o'-the-wisp virus (or viruses) that cause the first stages of a cold. He concentrated on the bacteria, believing that they cause the most distressing middle stages. He took throat swabs and saliva from his subjects, threw away those from the 75 controls. From the other 109 he cultured the bacteria to make sure there were no deadly strains among them, then hand-tailored an individual "autogenous vaccine" for each subject. Injections were given weekly.

To his own surprise, Experimenter Ritchie found that the method seemed to work. The comparison group getting inert injections had colds five times as often as the vaccinated. Many of the vaccinated got sniffles for a day or two. presumably from the irresistible virus, but then their colds usually stopped: during the test, they had only 13 "full colds," as against 77 for the controls.

Still Scairt. Encouraged by this evidence that most of the trouble in colds is caused by the victims' permanently resident bacteria, which go on a rampage only after the virus has prepared the ground for them, Ritchie decided to try prevention with antibiotics, although their too-free use for colds is frowned upon. To minimize the risks of sensitizing the subjects to the drugs or helping resistant strains of microbes to emerge, he decided to use very small doses, in tablets to be sucked twice a day when the first sniffles appeared. Ritchie used the three closely related antibiotics of the tetracycline group in 581 volunteers, and an inert tablet for comparison in 338 others. Results were slightly better than with the vaccine: 26 full colds per 100 volunteers on dummy tablets, only four per 100 on the antibiotics. In some cases the antibiotics caused severe irritation (sore throat or "flayed tongue"); vitamins are being tried to prevent this effect.

Says Cold-Fighter Ritchie: "Even now, as a canny Scot, I'm scairt to say too much about these results. What we need is more people to do similar tests in many thousands of cases."

*Though Johns Hopkins' Dr. Winston H. Price recently announced a vaccine that has shown promise against a virus strain prevalent in the Baltimore area (TIME, Sept. 30).

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