Colds – not just for Christmas
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 Echinacea drops, a traditional herbal remedy used for symptomatic relief of colds and influenza type infections and similar upper respiratory tract conditions, 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.
In 2004, Goel et al published a trial that demonstrated the efficiency of Echinacea in the treatment of colds and flu, when it is used as soon as a cold starts. At 7 days, 95% of the subjects using Echinacea were free of symptoms compared with only 63% in the placebo group. (Goel et al. J Clin Pharm Ther. 2004, 29 (1): 75 – 83.)
In 2005, Goel published another trial showing that volunteers taking Echinacea purpurea at the onset of a cold had a greater decrease in their daily symptom score than a placebo group. (Goel et al. Phytother Res. 2005 Aug; 19 (8): 689-94.)
The positive results achieved by Brinkeborn and Goel involved ethanolic extracts (tinctures) of Echinacea purpurea produced from freshly harvested plant material.
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