Block That Cold!

Are you one of those lucky devils who never catch a cold or can easily slough it off? Not me. Two days after my throat starts itching--the classic first sign of an upper-respiratory infection--I'm too congested to think straight. All I want to do for the next five days is sink into a warm bed or drown in a vat of chicken soup. So I was intrigued early last week by reports of a nasal spray, called Zicam, that is supposed to keep a cold from lasting more than a day and a half. Even though the results sounded too good to be true, I thought they were worth a closer look.

The initial reason for my skepticism was that colds are caused by hundreds of different kinds of viruses. Finding a single treatment that is cheap, as well as safe and effective against all of them, is a daunting task. (Today's cold remedies treat only the symptoms and not the cause.) Then I started wondering if the folks at Gel Tech, the company that developed Zicam, knew what they were doing. Just four days after Gel Tech announced that its study of Zicam had been accepted for publication by the American Journal of Infection Control, the journal editor asked the company to withdraw it. Like an overeager novelist, Gel Tech had given away too much of the ending before the story appeared in print.

What Zicam, which sells for $9 to $12 a bottle, has going for it is a simple idea for preventing cold viruses from attacking the nasal passages. Four years ago, a report in the Annals of Internal Medicine suggested that hapless snifflers could cut a cold's duration almost in half by sucking on foul-tasting zinc lozenges. That's because zinc ions are about the same size and shape as the molecular doorway through which one major group of cold viruses, called the rhinoviruses (rhino for "nose"), breaks into the nasal cells. Coat those viruses with zinc, and they're too big to slide through the door. Or at least that's the theory. So far, a dozen studies have shown mixed results.

Charles Hensley and his colleagues at Gel Tech thought the solution was as plain as, well, the nose on your face. Why not skip the mouth and spritz the zinc directly into the old proboscis? They developed a gel that can do just that and tried it out on 104 volunteers. The results of this study, having been withdrawn once, will probably never be published in a scientific journal. Because Zicam is marketed as a homeopathic remedy, however, the Food and Drug Administration doesn't require it to undergo rigorous testing.

At this point, the only fair thing to say about Zicam is that its benefits are still not proved. Maybe if I'm desperate, I'll try it next time I get a telltale tickle in my throat. In the meantime, I hope to sidestep the problem by following the advice of Dr. Jack Gwaltney of the University of Virginia School of Medicine, a top cold researcher. "Wash your hands a lot with soap and water," he says, because cold viruses like to linger there. Don't put your fingers in your eyes or nose, as they give easy access to the nasal passages.