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Biotech / Medical : GUMM - Eliminate the Common Cold -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DanZ who wrote (4033)	12/5/2001 6:28:03 PM
From: Hank	Respond to of 5582

I didn't get a copy of Hirt's paper today. Although I had a copy, I must have lost it when I recently moved. Unfortunately, the new library I now have access to doesn't carry ENT either. I could ask the Librarian to obtain a copy from an outside source but that would unnecessarily tie up their time, so I won't bother. However, I did obtain a copy of the article by Belongia. Although he tested zinc sulfate nasal spray, not Zicam, I did find some interesting facts. He enrolled 160 people in his study based on an assessment of their symptoms (as did Dr. Hirt). He also took nasal swabs from each to culture virus. Out of 160 patients, only 9 yielded a positive nasal swab for respiratory virus. Of these 9, only 6 where rhinovirus. One was parainfluenza and two were respiratory syncytial virus. So, out of 160 people who displayed classic cold symptoms, they were only able to detect rhinovirus in 6. That's an infection rate of only 3.75%. Could the rest of the people have had rhinovirus but it just wasn't detected? Possibly. However, the chances that so many bona fide rhinovirus infections would have come up false negative in a lab culture is extraordinarily small. This data supports what I've said before about the lack of viral identification in Dr. Hirt's study.