These Remedies Might or Might Not Help

The influenza season has officially begun.

“We’re seeing activity levels which are fairly low and fairly typical for this time of year,” said Dr. Keji Fukuda of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Last year’s flu season began in November, peaked in January and ended in May. An average of about 20,000 Americans die from influenza or its complications every year.

New Vaccine Hasn’t Induced Allergic Reaction

Canadian researchers in November began final trials of a new type of influenza vaccine made in cultured cells grown in the laboratory. Conventional flu vaccines are made with viruses grown in chicken eggs and cannot be given to people who are allergic to eggs. The production process also takes as much as a year, which can be a problem if new strains of the flu virus appear suddenly.

The new vaccine, developed by BioChem Vaccines of Laval, Quebec, has so far not induced allergic reactions in any recipients and appears to produce good immunity to the virus, according to Dr. Scott Halperin of Dalhousie University, who leads the new studies. It will also allow manufacture of larger quantities of a vaccine against a new strain of virus, should one appear.

Drug Can Shorten Length of Illness

A new drug can shorten flu victims’ suffering by as much as three days if they inhale it soon enough, according to a study appearing in the Sept. 25 New England Journal of Medicine.

The experimental medicine zanamivir was tested on 262 adults with the flu in 70 medical centers in North America and Europe. Zanamivir blocks a protein that the influenza virus needs to grow and replicate.

Dr. Frederick G. Hayden of the University of Virginia and his colleagues found that the medicine did not stop the illness but reduced its duration. The number of days that major symptoms, such as fever, headache, cough and muscle ache, persisted was one day shorter for those volunteers who inhaled the drug twice a day than for those who received the placebo. When the researchers focused on those who began inhaling the medicine within 30 hours after the onset of symptoms, they found zanamivir recipients had major symptoms for four days, compared with seven days among those who received the placebo. The drug did not affect the severity of the symptoms, however.

Zinc Lozenges’ Benefit Against Colds Questioned

The scientific case for using hot-selling zinc lozenges against the common cold remains weak at best, a review of six clinical trials cautions.

“Our [analysis] suggests that the evidence for benefit from treating colds with zinc salts is still lacking,” researchers from the Madigan Army Medical Center in Tacoma, Wash., concluded in the November Archives of Internal Medicine.

The researchers analyzed six studies, published over the last 15 years, that investigated the effect of zinc tablets on patients coming down with a cold. Three found some lessening of cold symptoms; three found no benefit, or worsening symptoms.

But taken together, the studies “failed to find a statistically significant benefit,” the review found. And they had methodological problems, including small size, inadequate follow-up and lack of detail about patients, along with more technical flaws in study design, such as the way patients are randomly divided into comparable groups and the way results are compared.

--Compiled by THOMAS H. MAUGH II