Colds - Not just for Christmas

by Alison Cullen

HEALTHY WAY MAGAZINE WEBISSUE 44 ARTICLE 3

Professor Ron Eccles, director of the Common Cold Centre at Cardiff University, believes that climate change may be having a bizarre knock-on effect on the health of Britons: making them vulnerable to colds all year round.
Rising temperatures cause people to catch milder infections, which may sound like a good thing but actually it means that they don’t produce an immune response strong enough to really kill off the virus and prevent it re-infecting them. Thus, they fall prey to it over and over again, maybe never feeling quite well as they fail to shake it off completely.

As the summers lengthen and winters get milder, so the cold season will ooze remorselessly into the spring and autumn until it permeates the whole calendar, rather than confining itself decently to the months of frost and hoar.

Fortunately for those of us who already suffer cold after cold through the winter and look forward to the respite of summer, there is a remedy that strengthens the immune system so that it will respond well to any virus that happens along, killing it off effectively and protecting the body against re-infection.

Echinaforce was shown to work against cold symptoms in a placebo-controlled trial that also proved its safety. Volunteers taking Echinaforce had a 63% reduction in common cold symptoms compared to those taking a placebo. Echinaforce was clinically proven to be very well tolerated and to have an excellent safety profile. Brinkeborn RM et al. Phytomedicine 6 (1), 1-6, 1999.

More recently, Echinaforce was taken by athletes, a group with a high susceptibility for common colds due to their intensive training schedules, during a 2-month period. 71% of the athletes remained cold free during this time, when they would usually be experiencing cold symptoms. The negative effect of extensive and exhaustive sports on the immune system was effectively countered by Echinaforce. Schoop R et al. Advances in Therapy November 2006. These results backed up a meta-analysis study done in 2006, which demonstrated that Echinacea extracts are effective in the prevention of the common cold. Schoop R et al. Clinical Therapeutics 28 (2); 174-183.

In July 2007 Lancet Infectious Diseases published research concluding that Echinacea can more than halve the risk of catching a common cold. This is the conclusion drawn by researchers from the School of Pharmacy at the University of Connecticut, who looked at 14 different studies on Echinacea. Overall, Echinacea was shown to decrease the odds of developing a cold by 58% and reduce the duration of colds by a day-and-a-half in people who were infected.

Echinacea reduced the likelihood of participants catching a cold naturally (i.e. in normal circumstances such as working with someone who has a cold) by 65%, and Professor Ron Cutler of the University of East London said that Echinacea, “decreases the severity of cough, headache and nasal congestion,” if people have already caught a cold. He gave it as his opinion that, “people with impaired immune function might benefit from taking Echinacea during the winter months to prevent colds and flu.”

So it is clear that most of the positive trials on Echinacea published in the last few years have used an ethanolic extract (tincture) of Echinacea purpurea produced from freshly harvested plant material – the same specifications as Echinaforce.

In-vitro research showed that A.Vogel Echinacea Throat Spray provided effective levels of antibacterial and antiviral activity. In addition, in recent double-blind placebo controlled trials, the A.Vogel Echinacea Throat Spray was proven to be as effective as a synthetic throat spray.

Also fewer people taking A.Vogel Echinacea Throat Spray used painkilling medication than those taking the conventional throat spray and over 94% of those taking the Echinacea Throat Spray said they would use it again. The adult dose is two sprays twice daily or 6-10 times in acute cases.

Directing the tincture through the special nozzle onto the back of the throat ensures that the spray hits just the right spot, setting the herbs to work within seconds by getting them into the blood stream extremely fast. This will improve the activity of immune cells in the area, speeding up the resolution of the infection.