Can Researchers Finally Cure the Common Cold? (cnbc.com) 97
Medical researchers are trying to make history, reports CNBC -- including a 100-person R&D group within AWS:
Amazon is working on a cure for the common cold in a years-long, top secret effort called "Project Gesundheit," according to three people familiar with the effort... The team is hoping to develop a vaccine, but is exploring a variety of approaches to the problem. Internally, the effort is sometimes referred to as the "vaccine project...."
Amazon isn't the only organization throwing resources into a cure for the cold. Researchers at Stanford and the University of California are working on a new approach that involves temporarily disabling a single protein inside our cells. Researchers at the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, which is funded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, the physician Priscilla Chan, also chipped into the effort. The researchers behind that group said, in a statement, that they were close to a cure.
Amazon isn't the only organization throwing resources into a cure for the cold. Researchers at Stanford and the University of California are working on a new approach that involves temporarily disabling a single protein inside our cells. Researchers at the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, which is funded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, the physician Priscilla Chan, also chipped into the effort. The researchers behind that group said, in a statement, that they were close to a cure.
Re: Nice! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Nice! (Score:4, Interesting)
All we need is far UVC lighting... (Score:1)
All of these illnesses would be toast if we simply had far UVC lighting in our homes and offices [nih.gov]. Kills viruses and bacteria, but is harmless to human skin and eyes.
Re:All we need is far UVC lighting... (Score:5, Informative)
All of these illnesses would be toast if we simply had far UVC lighting in our homes and offices [nih.gov]. Kills viruses and bacteria, but is harmless to human skin and eyes.
False in two ways. First way you are being grossly inaccurate, second way you are completely wrong, dangerously and irresponsibly so.
Only one of two specific UV-C wavelengths are needed for effective germicidal irradiation. They are narrow-band 254nm (interestingly and coincidentally, this is very close to the 253.7nm peak wavelength produced by Mercury vapor lamps at low pressure), and 185nm, which does not directly sanitize, but creates ozone from the oxygen in air, and then the ozone kills germs. Ozone itself is a better anti-bacterial agent than 254nm UV-C, so often anti-bacterial water filtration systems include both 254nm for direct germicidal irradiation and 185nm for indirectly sanitizing by creating ozone which is mixed with the water, which then even more effectively kills the germs and promotes free radicals.
The UV-C (and, incidentally, also UV-B) spectrum or any narrow part of it will also rapidly burn your skin, give you cancer, and painfully blind you, and it is all the more insidious because we can't see it. There was a case of a nurse being severely burned and eyes damaged because they were sitting for too long during a break near an instrument disinfection station that someone had forgotten to close and turn off the UV-C light.
wiki with citations [wikipedia.org]
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My first inclination was you were right, because I've worked with 254nm and 185nm and you don't want to be anywhere near them when they're operating. However, you should read the actual paper. They are investigating using shorter wavelengths, limited to a narrow band, for this purpose. From the paper:
By contrast, we have earlier shown that far-UVC light generated by filtered excimer lamps emitting in the 207 to 222nm wavelength range, efficiently inactivates drug-resistant bacteria, without apparent harm to exposed mammalian skin [13–15]. The biophysical reason is that, due to its strong absorbance in biological materials, far-UVC light does not have sufficient range to penetrate through even the outer layer (stratum corneum) on the surface of human skin, nor the outer tear layer on the outer surface of the eye, neither of which contain living cells; however, because bacteria and viruses are typically of micron or smaller dimensions, far-UVC light can still efficiently traverse and inactivate them [13–15].
Following citation 13 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov] :
Germicidal UV lamps, with a broad wavelength spectrum from 200 to 400 nm are an effective bactericidal option against drug-resistant and drug-sensitive bacteria, but represent a health hazard to patient and staff. By contrast, because of its limited penetration, ~200 nm far-UVC light is predicted to be effective in killing bacteria, but without the human health hazards to skin and eyes associated with conventional germicidal UV exposure. .... RESULTS: We found that 207-nm UV light kills MRSA efficiently but, unlike conventional germicidal UV lamps, produces little cell killing in human cells.
And citation 15 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov] :
We have previously shown that 207-nm ultraviolet (UV) light has similar antimicrobial properties as typical germicidal UV light (254 nm), but without inducing mammalian skin damage. The biophysical rationale is based on the limited penetration distance of 207-nm light in biological samples (e.g. stratum corneum) compared with that of 254-nm light. Here we extended our previous studies to 222-nm light and tested the hypothesis that there exists a narrow wavelength window in the far-UVC region, from around 200-222 nm, which is significantly harmful to bacteria, but without damaging cells in tissues.
So in short, yes, UVC is generally very harmful, certainly the stuff coming from a typical mercury
Re:All we need is far UVC lighting. (Score:2)
So, we know 185nm wavelength is bad news due to creation of ozone (though 200nm and smaller wavelengths will also create ozone, 185nm is notably most efficient in doing so), and all of UV-C that does not generate ozone under any conditions, and the wavelengths that do, are widely accepted (and supportive scientific studies published) to be a danger to skin and sight, including the 254nm wavelength and longer wavelengths to above the midrange of UV-B, but the wavelengths in between 207nm and 222nm are someho
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I'm not the AC who mentioned the stuff above. I was just intrigued by what he said, and looked at the paper to see if he was just bullshitting. This isn't my field, but I can at least sniff test the research.
If you look at the papers, their use case is to sanitize surgery sites before closing them up. Their target is to be able to kill off small amounts of bugs which land there (they're showing an efficacy of around 99.99%, which makes it much easier for the immune system to mop up), while not killing mu
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That's also a good point - exposed live tissue would get burned. That probably means this idea can't be extended for general room cleaning.
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All these "I've got the cure for all disease" wingnuts forget the essential Unobtanium and Handwavium. I know that everyone has these in the bathroom cabinet, but it still needs stating.
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If you have a "pretty poor immune system" (as in, you seem to endlessly suffer from respiratory viruses), get your DNA sequenced by 23&me, then check the results to see whether you have a heterzygous CCR5-delta32 mutation.
On the plus side, if you do, you're naturally immune to most strains of HIV. And I believe dengue, many other hemorrhagic fevers, and a few other viruses.
On the minus side, you have that immunity against HIV because your immune system fucks up the final step of curing infections -- mak
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There are so many things wrong with this. You're mixing actual truths with things that are very much not true (or possibly you made up).
Heterozygosity only gives you some resistance to HIV. You need to be homozygous to actually be immune to it. The mutation is simply in one of the receptors that HIV needs to infect the cell (the CCR5 receptor). By having the mutation, HIV can't bind to that receptor and thus can't infect the cell.
Your immune system never "makes a copy" of a virus to give you immunity, and t
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Right, everything else in the world should stop dead in its tracks until one problem is completely resolved.
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This is so right. I mean, they clearly didn't start these research programs *in the last two months*.
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Uh...the recognition of Covid-19 is only a few months old. These other projects were started well before that. Since they are working on similar viruses to Covid-19, there's a chance their research may aid the Covid-19 research.
Re:Nice! (Score:4, Funny)
"while his only response as governor was to clutch the Bible and beg the sinners to repent."
That's incorrect. He has been diligent painting his door posts with lambs blood.
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I have no doubt that something of the sort is protecting the Vice President's Residence, but in fairness Pence did delegate any responsibility for the coronavirus response to a qualified doctor from the CDC immediately, as soon as Trump tried to delegate it to him.
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The vast majority of the deaths (81%) are still in China, mostly in Wuhan. You can't blame Trump for those. Nor can you blame Trump for the 21 deaths so far in the USA. Nobody could have stopped this from entering the US.
To know the impact of the Trump Administration's handling of this, we'll have to look back on it in about two to three months.
Re: Nice! (Score:2, Interesting)
Huh? What? No. We can blame him for being an IDIOT for not only doubting SMEs but also trying to spread that doubt.
As a radio talk show host or comedian or tv star, you can say you don't believe in the 3.4%. But it's a little more than irresponsible to do so when you are holding the position of POTUS. Leave it to the experts because he isn't one.
Re: Nice! (Score:2)
No one believes that 3.4% will be the actual death rate. Itâ(TM)s the current death rate based on known cases not the projected death rate. On the closest thing we have to a controlled experiment (the cruise ship) the death rate was under 1% and cruises tend to tilt older. For that matter, all 7 people on the cruise ship who died were over 70.
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On the cruise ships it was relatively easy to keep infected separated from uninfected, that is why the death rate is relatively low.
Death rate varies from country to country, also the time of recovery.
I assume that many countries simply have not good enough numbers about the status of the population.
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I think this is a man who way, way, way over his head. For the record I believe 3.4% is the real death rate, but it doesn't mean what people think it means. Even in China if you leave out Hubei the death rate is 0.7%.
Now imagine, I dunno, any non-technical manager you ever tried to explain anything that complicated to. I know it's not actually complicated, but most people don't have the patience to sit through an explanation that the *context* of a number can make it misleading. That could easily get g
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Not with that attitude, that's for damn sure.
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It's been reported in 75 countries now, including every one of the US's top fifteen trading partners.
It was always only a matter of time.
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A matter of wasted time. The travel ban for people that had recently been in China bought about a month to develop a real response, and nothing was done other than denial and deflection by calling it the latest "hoax" by those evil Democrats.
Now people are dying, and Congress is just getting off their ass with an emergency funding bill late last week? If it was always only a matter of time, why the fuck didn't the President ask Congress for emergency funding a month ago? Why didn't he set up his "task fo
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To know the impact of the Trump Administration's handling of this, we'll have to look back on it in about two to three months.
And realistically the complete information probably won't come out for a decade or so.
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Sure, but by June we will have something to go on. Right now the only thing you can really lay at their feet is the shortage of test kits. In part that was bad luck, but the FDA should have moved to approve the WHO test; that's the result of some disarray at the agency.
I don't think the White House has done well handling this. Claiming that the number of cases would soon be down to 5 was foolish; that may squander credibility they'll need later. Also the White House forcing the CDC to tone down its warni
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The POTUS has nothing to do with administering public health.
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Except for the FDA and CDC being departments of the Federal government, of which he is Chief.
Except for being able to ask the Congress for emergency funding to deal with this problem before it becomes a widespread problem.
Except for being able to use the President's awesome influence with media to calm the public so that panicky dumb shit doesn't happen, like shortages of masks that don't do fuck-all to stop this thing.
Yeah, the President has nothing to do with administering public health at all.
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He is not "Chief." That is just a fake thing.
Congress spending money is Congress doing something.
He is not a calming influence.
You completely struck out.
Re:Nice! (Score:4, Insightful)
>"People are dying by the thousands because POTUS believes that all viruses are the same and can be cured by a single vaccine."
-1 Troll to you.
What in the world are you ranting about? The POTUS had nothing to do with the creation or spread of COVID19. And people are not "dying by the thousands" due to any action on his part. Viruses happen. Viruses spread. Viruses mutate. They have been doing so long before there were humans. NOTHING anyone could do would have prevented its spread.... and it will continue.... regardless of what we do now. The object it is slow it down and work on finding treatments.
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NOTHING anyone could do would have prevented its spread.... and it will continue.... regardless of what we do now.
Quarantine.
Chinese seem to be preventing its spread.
They have half the number of new daily cases as the USA and they have about 20k more active cases to deal with and 4x as many people.
Iran and Italy are at the other end of the scale. There are degrees of spread.
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>"Quarantine."
Well, yeah. I suppose I should have qualified. Nothing anyone could do in his position would have prevented its spread. He did suspend travel from affected regions. We are investigating, warning, educating. We do quarantine those who are positive (as far as I am aware). But we are [supposedly] a free country [unlike China] and can't just quarantine everyone who sneezes! Colds, flu, allergies- we could have to suspend the Constitutional rights of a huge swath of the population. Besi
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Nothing anyone could do in his position would have prevented its spread.
Quarantine
He did suspend travel from affected regions.
Good job
We are investigating, warning, educating.
Not enough testing. Not enough warning when Trump downplays and contradicts the experts. Certainly not educating when Trump is telling people nonsense.
We do quarantine those who are positive (as far as I am aware).
Not enough testing. Quarantined people are still free to go about infecting other people.
But we are [supposedly] a free country [unlike China] and can't just quarantine everyone who sneezes!
Clearly the Chinese response wouldn't fly in America. But America could at least do adequate testing and actually quarantine people it 'quarantines'.
Besides, it is transmissible long before there are even symptoms.
We really don't know the details. Perhaps with more testing you could have found out.
There aren't enough resources in the entire country to investigate everyone who came in contact weeks before with another person who might have shown symptoms.
True, America didn't
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>"People are dying by the thousands because POTUS believes that all viruses are the same and can be cured by a single vaccine."
-1 Troll to you.
What in the world are you ranting about? The POTUS had nothing to do with the creation or spread of COVID19. And people are not "dying by the thousands" due to any action on his part. Viruses happen. Viruses spread. Viruses mutate. They have been doing so long before there were humans. NOTHING anyone could do would have prevented its spread.... and it will continue.... regardless of what we do now. The object it is slow it down and work on finding treatments.
But at least we can blame Trump for being the primary cause of TDS among millions of impressionable CNN viewers right?
Re: Nice! (Score:2)
People are dying by the thousands because POTUS believes that all viruses are the same and can be cured by a single vaccine.
There are not even a thousand confirmed cases in the USA so no people are not dying by the thousands in the USA because of the POTUS unless you are somehow blaming the POTUS for people dying in other countries.
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unless you are somehow blaming the POTUS for people dying in other countries.
Those brown people won't just bomb themselves.
(OK some do blow themselves up...)
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The USA has 550 cases and an absurd high death rate, 21 dead already.
In three or four days it will be most likely above 1000 ...
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"The common cold" isn't a thing (Score:1)
There is no virus called "the common cold". It's a generic term for mild infections caused by close to 200 different viruses from 8 or 9 different families.
Sure they are close (Score:2)
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*QUAC FUND for short.
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Because Zuckerberg and Gates need funding...
It's just PR to make people think they aren't total assholes.
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Yeah, but if they manage to cure the common cold, it's gonna make then SO rich!
The common cold doesnâ(TM)t need a cure. (Score:1)
The effects are minimal and mortality is zero. Seriously, study something else.
Does misery count for nothing? (Score:2)
The effects are minimal and mortality is zero. Seriously, study something else.
By your metric, it would be fine if every person on earth was employed by spamming firms. The effects are minimal, just a small annoyance to any one person at any one time...
Re: Does misery count for nothing? (Score:1)
If the option was to eradicate spamming firms (common cold) or nuclear detonations (heart disease) Iâ(TM)d go for the latter.
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Fortunately, it's not a matter of making a choice like that. Instead, it's a matter of more basic research improving our knowledge of how various systems work, so working on one may eventually help with the other. Even if we take the time to put bandages on minor cuts, we can still put casts on broken arms.
Re: Does misery count for nothing? (Score:1)
Of course you choose what to follow. If you have the facility and decide to cure the common cold instead of heart disease, you have made the wrong choice
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Re: Does misery count for nothing? (Score:1)
I picked heart disease because it causes more deaths than anything else in developed nations. It's literally the biggest killer out there. The same cannot be said for the common cold.
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Stupid value judgments are stupid.
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Sure if you are not too young and not too old. How young or how old? Well, if the common cold kills you, then you were too young or too old. Besides, more research on viruses is a good thing.
Re: The common cold doesnâ(TM)t need a cure. (Score:1)
âoethe common coldâ doesnâ(TM)t kill anyone*
*In any real sense. I concede there are one-in-a-billion edge cases.
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The physical symptoms might be minimal.
But there will be millions of working days lost each year due to the common cold alone. Even if you go to work 4 days in the week and have 1 day off because that's the days that the symptoms are peaking, that's still lost productivity.
Re: The common cold doesnâ(TM)t need a cure. (Score:1)
Thatâ(TM)s a good point. Economically it makes sense. In fact (tinfoil hat) thatâ(TM)s exactly why amazon are doing it!
Re: The common cold doesnâ(TM)t need a cure. (Score:1)
My comment was more flippant than I meant, you have hit the nail on the head.
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if heart disease and cancer researchers get a cold, they won't be researching heart disease or cancer.
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$40B annual cost to US economy (Score:2)
Colds cost the U.S. economy an estimated $40 billion per year, both because of physician visits and lost productivity, according to a landmark 2003 study from the University of Michigan. That number is likely far higher today. That study found that colds, which often last a week, are also responsible for nearly 200 million missed school days, which often mean that parents also have to stay home.
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Yeah, because ongoing research into coronavirus strains and general knowledge about preventing viral infection could never come in handy, and is a total waste of time.
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Really? Anybody here actually talk to this Allah fellow. I don't buy the BS that he's so Other than he cannot communicate directly. If he was so great, this wouldn't be a problem for him.
And Muhammad also declared he'd be the last profit. Gee, not hard to figure out he was scam artist. "Vote for me and I'll set you free!" And why does the prophet of a "peaceful" religion go off conquering his fellows? Power corrupts...something the Evangelicals could ponder when they are not chasing down illegal aliens and
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Ack, prophet, although the boy certainly did profit from his endeavors. He had nothing on the current Prosperity Preachers.
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The Common Cold? Which one? (Score:5, Informative)
What we call the "common cold" is several different viruses that have common symptoms.
The most common are Rhinovirus, Coronavirus (Not the COVID-19 strain, which has more serious symptoms), Respiratory Syncytial Virus, Influenza and Parainfluenza (these two can cause more serious symptoms that would not be described as a cold), and maybe a couple hundred more. (If you are an adult, you have probably had the common Coronavirus a couple times in your life and experienced it as a cold)
If someone actually claims to have a cure for the common cold, they would need to have developed a broad spectrum anti-viral medication that successfully treats at least the above viruses, and probably many many more.
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Theoretically, they could develop a vaccine for each class of virus if they can find a way to target the part that doesn't mutate. The only loosely accurate model is that they have head with the infection payload and a long tail that does nothing. The tail mutates easily, and is what the body's immune system sees and learns to fight. If they can develop a vaccine that trains the immune system to attack the head, we can protect against the entire class rendering the frequent mutations irrelevant.
The other
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Herpes Esophagitis (Score:2)
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Re:The Common Cold? Which one? (Score:4, Interesting)
Just stopping rhinovirus and all known coronavirus strains would go a long way.
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Surely, only good will come of this ... (Score:2)
... shooting gallery of evil people.
Also, why disable a protein in *my* body? It is there for a reason! Why not disable something in the virus? Like a sane person!
This is like doctors amputating the spleen "because it is useless" all over again. Until somebody found out it is the immune system's long term memory and standing army. Great job amputating it, geniuses! You sure knew everyting, and are true gods in white!
Thanks but I'll wait for real doctors and real scientists to solve this. Not you overrated h
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Also, why disable a protein in *my* body? It is there for a reason!
Go back to school?
Your body is replicating the virus ... so obviously some proteins involved in it would prevent the replication if they are disabled.
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To figure that we have medical trials.
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Also, why disable a protein in *my* body? It is there for a reason! Why not disable something in the virus? Like a sane person!
Yes, why not disable a protein or enzyme in the virus before it even infects the cell, asks BAReFO0t, who has clearly studied virology at the Dunning-Kruger Institute.
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Just one more needed breatkthrough... (Score:1)
Cheap identification of "what did I have?" (Score:2)
Is there any company in the US where, if you get some random minor illness & want to know (long after the fact) what it actually WAS for the sake of your own scientific curiosity, you can do something like:
1. Get sick.
2. Take appropriate samples (nasal and/or throat swab, blood, saliva).
3. Mail them to the lab & pay a relatively low fee for non-urgent, non-expedited "whenever they get around to it" testing
4. The lab tries to identify the virus(es) and/or bacteria involved. Not just as "a cold", but
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