Medicine: Cold War Breakthrough

Medicine’s most widespread and stubborn enemy, the common cold, has been forced into a small but significant retreat. Epidemiologist Winston H. Price, 33, of Johns Hopkins University, last week announced development of a vaccine-proved 80% effective in initial tests—to combat a major virus that may cause up to a third of all common colds.

Dr. Price (Ph.D. in general physiology) reported tests run on 100 children exposed to an outbreak of colds resulting from the virus. Those who got no vaccine caught eight times as many colds as those who did get it (in two 1-cc. hypodermic shots a month apart). Indications are that the vaccine will give protection for eight months, maybe longer.

The virus that the vaccine fights was first spotted by Dr. Price himself four years ago, remains the only common cold virus to be successfully isolated for vaccine development. Named JH (for Johns Hopkins), it was discovered by accident in 1953 during an influenza study, when a group of Hopkins nurses came down with stuffed-up noses, scratchy throats, mild fever and coughs. Dr. Price took nasal washings, isolated what he thought was a flu virus, but suspected when the nurses got no worse that he was dealing not with flu at all but with the common cold. Further testing took until last December, when Researcher Price finally announced isolation of the virus (“We wanted to make sure we really had a cold virus”). By then, Price was already well along in his experimental vaccination program. Using techniques similar to those employed in developing Salk anti-polio .vaccine, Price and his staff grew JH virus in monkey kidney tissue, killed it with formaldehyde to ready it for inoculation. Though development of JH vaccine seems a big step forward in cold prevention, it is far from a sneeze-ending panacea. Pending further studies, the American Medical Association is withholding judgment. Still to be determined, among other things: whether the vaccine can be produced commercially and how long it gives immunity without booster shots. Dr. Price himself cautiously points out that so far he has discovered only one mild cold-causing virus. Says he: “There are at least one and possibly more viruses which must be isolated if we are to have the complete picture. This is just the entering wedge.”