Chicken soup season

Everyone I know, including myself, has been sneezing, sniffing or talk like they have a rubber ball stuck inside their noses. It is the season of the common cold and for something so common, it is amazing that medical science has not yet found an antidote for it. No matter what drug companies tell you in their dazzling ads, there is NO cure yet for the common cold.

Colds is an infection and it is caused by many kinds of viruses — rhinoviruses, adenoviruses, coronaviruses, among many others — and because they are caused by viruses and not bacteria, there is no antibiotic for it. The medications that you see in drug stores are the ones directed at the symptoms of the common cold like headaches, runny nose, congestion and fever. When you take these drugs, you could relieve yourself of these inconvenient symptoms but you are not making a dent on the virus that caused your cold. You are also risking the harmful side effects from these drugs. This is why scientists are wondering if we should really continue looking for a cure.

An article by Veronique Greenwood in the January 2010 issue of the Scientific American posed that question and she explained the main difficulty surrounding the search for a cure. It is mainly because there are so many kinds of virus causing the cold and it is so difficult to find a common trait among a group of them to target with an anti-virus drug. It is also because a cold virus, particularly rhinoviruses easily mutate and change right away and if that happens, the cross-hairs of any drug developed for it would render it out of focus. She also mentioned that the side effects of some drugs that seem to be promising seem to be more serious than the cold itself. But what researchers are now focusing on is trying to find a group of cold viruses that exacerbate other conditions like asthma and target them. The article did not sound so optimistic and I got the impression that we really should just endure the common cold rather than count on these very elusive attempts to capture this commoner for good.

Last November 2010, the Independent online reported a discovery which practically overturned what we thought about the immune system. The discovery happened in the laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge led by Leo James. Previously, it was thought and reflected in the many books studied by medical students, that when a virus enters a cell, there is no other way for our immune system to defend itself but to kill the infected cell. But for the first time, they were able to see that the antibodies — those defenders of the immune system — can actually enter the cell with the virus and wage their war inside the cell. This means then that there is a way for our own immune system, once it produces the antibodies that will match the mettle of the invaders, to win its own battle inside the cells without destroying the cellular battlefields. The trick now is how to coax our own systems to produce the soldier proteins to ride with the virus into the cell and settle their differences inside the cell. The article stopped short of prescribing the ways to equip our own immune system with homegrown ammunition.

So now what? We wait helplessly? How about those commonly applied “cures” to the common cold like Vitamin C, juices and chicken soup? As far as Vitamin C is concerned, a very extensive review of 60 years worth of studies on the effects of Vitamin C on colds in 2007 yielded almost nothing. It did not prevent colds but shortened its duration (not much at all). Vitamin C, however, seemed to work for those whose conditions require their system to work harder.  Knowing that, I think all the stresses brought on by climate change — like unusually heavy rains, floods, etc would qualify as “compromising” conditions. But I have yet to find a study identifying these as qualifying conditions.

Juices are helpful but so are other liquids as they would loosen the traffic of fluids in your system and prevent dehydration which would cause you to dry up and give you an itchy throat. Chicken soup, however, seems to be better than Vitamin C. Studies have identified the soup as containing something that affects the movements of white blood cells — the ones charged to fight infection. But science has not yet figured out exactly what in chicken soup is that “something.” Some experiments even compared the effects of chicken soup with that of ordinary liquids and the former fared better in healing patients with colds.

Science, however, is not yet prepared for a final verdict on the power of chicken soup over the common cold. But given that we have progressed more with a cure for HIV/AIDS than with a pharmaceutical hero to save us from the common cold, I say we go for chicken soup. Even if it does not cure you, it will be a good soothing meal, especially if prepared by the ones who care about you. Just do not e-mail me about chicken soup failing to save your soul.

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