Can You Catch a Cold?
Untold History & Human Experiments
Written and published by Daniel Roytas
In today’s culture, this book’s title may seem like a dumb question. It is difficult for the average person to believe that what they have been told all their lives is wrong. In the case of contagion, surely there must be a mountain of scientific evidence that the common cold is contagious. Have you looked? Author Daniel Roytas has.
He found many studies that tried to assess how contagion works with colds and flu. The U.S. military did intensive studies unsuccessfully attempting to prove the Spanish Flu was contagious. The Russian flu pandemic of the late 1800s started in several widely separate places at about the same time—a strange pattern for contagion. The Common Cold Research Unit in Salisbury, England spent six and a half years attempting to infect different animal species with a cold. In one trial, subjects were inoculated with combined nasal washings of twenty-six sick people. Regardless of the results, what exactly would that prove? As the old joke goes, you can pick your friends, you can pick your nose but you can’t pick your friend’s nose. A study like that does not remotely resemble what goes on in real life. Despite all these studies and more, researchers were not able to prove anything about contagion. Many studies failed to make even one healthy person sick. Others managed to induce illness in a small percentage of cases, but did not use a double-blind or placebo-controlled design.
Studies that injected saline solution mixed with a sick person’s snot up a healthy person’s nose made a minority of test subjects sick, but other studies using just saline solution had the same result. About all that you can conclude is that hosing your nose with saline solution is not a good health move. No studies used purified virus. An untold number of contagion studies were never published. Studies that attempt unsuccessfully to make people sick are not very interesting. “Yes, we tried to make all these people sick and, well, nothing happened.” Studies like that often end up at the bottom of a drawer or trash can.
Florence Nightingale wrote: “Facts are everything—doctrines are nothing. See what harm the German pathologists have done us. There are no specific diseases. There are specific disease conditions.” She concluded that “the doctrine of contagion” is “a grand thing for weak minds.” A physician named Dr. Rodermund gave the weak minds a grand scare when he smeared smallpox pus all over his face and hands and then exposed at least three dozen unsuspecting people to that pus. He was arrested but ultimately released when police couldn’t come up with anything to charge him with. He didn’t hurt anyone or make anyone sick, and he wasn’t trying to do so. He knew from experience that no one would get sick. He was trying to demonstrate that smallpox contagion was a weak-minded figment of the imagination.
Roytas goes through several theories that try to explain what does cause colds. He makes good points about how powerful the nocebo effect is (adverse events produced by negative expectations). People who are told they have cancer and have weeks to live are often remarkably compliant about dying right on schedule, even if an autopsy shows no cancer or obvious physical reason for them to be dead. Other theories include temperature or humidity changes, and ammonia or ozone in the atmosphere. Strangely, unless I missed it, there is no mention of radiation. The Naval Medical Research Institute published a paper in the 1970s covering more than twenty-three hundred references on biological responses to radiofrequencies that overlap with what we now call 5G. Many of the symptoms match cold or flu. Anyway, the information in this book is very good and the thumb is UP.
This article appeared in Wise Traditions in Food, Farming and the Healing Arts, the quarterly journal of the Weston A. Price Foundation, Fall 2024
🖨️ Print post
Leave a Reply