This cold is WEIRD, man. You may remember a few weeks ago when I noted that I was sick; that cold followed its normal course of a day of scratchy throat pain, followed by a day of complete sinus blockage, followed by a couple days of drippiness and general malaise. With the help of Zicam (remind me to tell you a story later about how apparently my father-in-law’s friends discovered that zinc cures colds), I got over it quickly and sang the Messiah concert the following weekend with great ease.
On Sunday, the cold came back, but it appears to be working in reverse. The past few days I’ve been clogged up and drippy, and then this morning I awoke with agonizing throat pain, but my sinuses are clear. It’s a mixed-up, mashed-up, cuhRAZY world, kids.
More annoying is the fact that Charles seems to be going through the same symptoms; he spent the last few days sniffly, and I think the throat pain hit late last night because he awoke screaming and we had a hard time calming him down. (He’s a jolly fellow, but like any baby, once he gets revved up the crying is more for the sake of continuity than actual pain or anguish.) He seems fine this morning, which was good because I was in no mood to deal with his anguish, because apparently Sarah spent the night pouring Comet into my mouth.
Anyway, the interesting story involving my father-in-law’s friends: apparently he worked with a couple of guys who were interested in what might kill regular rhinovirus, aka the cause of the common head-cold. Back in the 70s, Their lab had a storage closet where they kept leftover chemicals, so these guys would score some rhinovirus germs (I’m assuming they knew a guy on 32nd street) pour various chemicals on ’em, and watch.
Finally they hit upon something; they had a dirty jar of some kind of acid, I forget exactly what it was because it was a big word, poured it on the germs, and noted that they died in screaming agony. This was a good sign. So they organized a serious study, and one of the guys decided it would be best if they cleaned up the chemical to get the dirty gunk out of the jar, so they ran it through a filter. They ran their test, and nothing happened. The acid wasn’t killing anything.
They went back and grabbed the filter they’d used, scraped off some of the mung, put it in the germs, and watched with great glee. Unfortunately, they weren’t sure what the mung WAS. They ran a bunch of tests on it and discovered that it was mostly zinc, so they organized a study involving human subjects.
It was a bit of a failure; the sick folks would take a chewy zinc thing, and nothing would happen. The only person that seemed to consistently get better was a little girl who insisted that the tablet tasted really bad and refused to swallow it. She just kept chewing on it. (Personally, if something tastes bad, I want to get it AWAY from my tongue, but miniature females are even more stubborn and immune to logic than the full-size versions.) The scientists realized that folks had to keep the zinc in their mouths so that it would somehow get breathed up into their sinuses and kill the germs in there.
In the end, the company decided that since zinc was widely available (most vitamins contain it, for example), it wasn’t something they could patent, so they didn’t bother to market it. Still, it’s interesting to note that Science knew about the magical healing powers of zinc almost 30 years before Zicam started making their chewables/tablets/sprays/etc.
