Echinacea Treatment for the Common Cold

treatment, but because of the fact that echinacea treatments have required an unjustified large expenditure of money for their use. The common cold is defined in the Harrison textbook of medicine [2] as a mild, self-limited viral infection of the upper respiratory tract. Adults experience, on average, 2‐4 colds per year, and children experience about twice that number. The textbook states that rhinoviruses with 100 different immunotypes cause ∼40% of cases, and that other respiratory viruses, especially corona viruses, cause the others. Newer studies using PCR analysis for diagnosis suggest that ∼50% of common colds may be due to rhinoviruses. On this basis, it should be emphasized that the common cold is caused by many serologically distinct rhinoviruses, as well as a number of other viruses. It seems unlikely that echinacea has an antiviral spectrum broad enough to affect so many viruses. The suggestion that echinacea may act by enhancing immune responsiveness is also difficult to reconcile with the significant negative findings with respect to the treatment’s effect on clinical disease and to the uninhibited virus shedding. It should also be noted that many years of intensive research in many laboratories have produced only a small number of unequivocally therapeutically active antiviral drugs, and none have achieved a high level of utility. With evidence of little or no therapeutic