Medicine: What's Good for a Cold?

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All around the Northern Hemisphere this week, with winter's assault of colds and influenza near its seasonal peak, millions of sniffling, hacking customers went to the corner drugstore to shop for what they hoped would be a cure, or at least a palliative, for their suffering. Whether they called their complaint a cold or catarrh, die Grippe— or flu, the answer was the same: for none of these illnesses caused by viruses does medicine have a cure. The best that any victim can expect is the relief of some immediate symptoms and unimpeded recovery from the original viral infection before a secondary bacterial infection can cause complications.

(Best known and gravest: pneumonia.) Despite the fact that people swallow an infinite variety of pills, tablets, capsules and syrups, medical scientists are still far from agreed as to which of them are best —or even whether any treatment for uncomplicated viral infections is desirable. A runny nose is an uncomfortable and socially embarrassing symptom, but the increased fluid secretion by the nasal mucosa is, some experts believe, one of the body's defenses against viral invasion. Drying up the mucosa (usually with anti-histamines), they say, may simply prolong the battle. The fever that results from many virus infections is also widely regarded as a major defense mechanism, might best be allowed to run its course.

Nature Does Its Best. No physician has yet had a good word to say for the headache and muscle pains of grippe or flu, so mild, painkilling drugs win ready approval. Trouble is that the commonest of these are aspirin and related salicylates —and these also drop the body temperature. Therefore even they may do harm as well as good.

The traditionally most potent fever fighter has been quinine. Thanks to its long and distinguished history as the only effective weapon against the recurrent fevers of malaria, quinine is still highly regarded in Europe and among many older Americans (especially in the recently malarial South) for treating fevers. Last week, in Munich's Medizinische Wochen-schrift, Dr. Wolfgang-Dietrich Müller damned quinine with the results of a study on thousands of patients in Bielefeld. Among those who took quinine pills at the first sniffle, Asian flu was five to ten times as common as among those who let nature do its best. Quinine, he suggested, may actually be harmful by blocking the body's defense reactions. (In any case, quinine's effect in malaria is against the parasites themselves, so it is ineffective against fevers from other causes.)

Aspirin & Sophistication. In the U.S., such old favorites as Hill's Cascara Quinine (Whitehall Pharmacal Co.) and Bromo Quinine (Grove Laboratories, Inc.) retain a faithful but shrinking following. They have been crowded to the side of druggists' counters by supposedly more sophisticated products of the antibiotic, antihistamine age. A current favorite is Coricidin (Schering Corp.), combining APC with a small enough dose of the antihistamine Chlor-Trimeton to be sold without prescription. If the customer does not know what he wants, many druggists recommend this. Competitive runners-up: Dristan (Whitehall) and Super-Anahist (Anahist Research Laboratories). Ascorbic acid (vitamin C) has become popular, though its value is largely unproved.