For the past 10 years, I’ve had a secret weapon against colds. Zicam was (was being the operative term) a zinc gel that you squirted up into your sinuses through your nose. It was developed in a surprisingly simple, yet effective manner. They simply filled a huge number of Petri dishes with anything they could think of that wouldn’t be detrimental to a human body, then infected all of them with a cold virus and observed which had the slowest growth rate. The winner was zinc, which when introduced into the sinuses, inhibits the growth of the virus long enough for the body’s own defenses to keep the cold symptoms to a minimum. I’ve nipped many a cold in the bud using this wondrous concoction.
The down side to this is that zinc affects your sense of smell. In fact, that is what scientists use to kill the sense of smell in lab rats when required for experimental purposes. Used incorrectly, one’s sense of smell can be permanently destroyed. Fortunately, the scent receptors are placed high up inside the nasal passages, beyond where the gel could go when used per the instructions. Even so, I’ve noticed a diminished sense of smell when using Zicam, some of which may have been attributable to the cold itself. It usually took a few weeks for it to return to normal.
Well, the popular media grabbed a hold of the 100 or so reported cases of smell loss (out of the millions used) and ran with it. Many of those cases resulted from an ill-advised variant, a nasal spray that was more easily sniffed back up into the high nasal passages. This variant was yanked from the market many years ago. That didn’t seem to matter to the media, which began to call for an FDA recall and investigation. To save face, the parent company pulled the gel and replaced it with a throat lozenge. I tried that with my last cold, but it was totally ineffective. It only makes sense; it was developed to inhibit the virus in the sinuses. The lozenge dissolves in your throat and ends up in your stomach – how is it going to help there?
I woke up with a sore throat this morning. Rats.
