Today, zinc supplements are found on the health-food shelves of pharmacies and drug stores, alongside ginseng, yeast extract, and oil of wintergreen. But let us not forget that today's alternative or homeopathic medicine -- complementary is probably a better word -- is tomorrow's orthodox medicine. There are plenty of examples to illustrate this point: from the use of digitalis to prevent heart attack or quinine to prevent malaria, to the technique of vaccination to prevent infectious disease. The latter is a particularly striking example. Three centuries ago the practice of variolation (inhaling the pus from a small-pox victim to protect oneself against the onset of this disfiguring disease) was not so much an old wives' tale as a young mistress's tale: having been used for centuries earlier by the Chinese, it was prescribed for the Circassian maidens who inhabited the sultan's seraglio in the Ottoman Empire to protect their luscious skins. Today, following on from the success story of the small-pox vaccine, billions of dollars are being spent by the most respected research establishments of the world to develop vaccines against malaria, influenza, HIV, and a host of other infectious agents. If we had a vaccine against rhinoviruses, we might not need to fight the common cold with Zn²⁺ ions from zinc lozenges.

The trouble with zinc is that, like vitamin C, it is present in most of our diets in quantities sufficient to prevent major deficiency disease (rare enough, anyway, in the case of zinc). Why should we take more? The answer lies in the way in which vitamins and other essential nutrients such as iron, copper, zinc, or iodine work: with the possible exception of iodine, whose function seems to be confined to the thyroid gland, most other vitamins and nutrients play a role in practically every tissue of the body. For example, while the dietary intake of vitamin C or zinc by healthy people of the Western world may be sufficient to prevent scurvy or the skin disease of Acrodermatitis enteropathica, respectively, this does not mean that a little bit extra may not be beneficial in fighting a number of different infectious diseases. For not only do vitamin C and zinc function in many different tissues, but the natures of those functions are manifold. Zinc, for example, is required for dozens of quite different molecular interactions within cells: it is easy to envisage that at a particular dietary intake most of these work normally, but one or two are below par; this would place the individual at risk for the onset of disease. Moreover, the imposition of a particular stress such as a viral infection places additional demands on certain cells within the body, and no one should be surprised that a higher concentration than normal of a critical nutrient such as zinc turns out to be beneficial.

George Eby is a courageous man. He is neither scientist nor physician, yet he has battled with the medical establishment and pharmaceutical companies for a decade to persuade them to take seriously his proposal regarding throat lozenges releasing Zn²⁺ ions as an effective treatment for common colds. There is room in all walks of life for astute and intelligent men like George Eby: the challenge from inquiring and critical laymen is often immensely beneficial to scientists and physicians set in their ways. And who in the United States can doubt the contributions made by their most eminent layman -- President Thomas Jefferson? While George Eby's suggestion 15 years ago that his hospitalized leukemic daughter be given additional nutrients that included zinc may have not been as dramatic as the decision 250 years ago of Lady Mary Worley Montague -- wife of the British Envoy in Constantinople -- to administer a small dose of live small pox to her son to protect him against subsequent exposure, George Eby may nevertheless have stumbled onto more than one novel form of therapy using zinc. Read what follows and judge for yourself.


Charles A. Pasternak, Ph.D., D.Sc., Hon M.D.
Professor of Biochemistry
University of London at
St George's Hospital Medical School
London (UK)
and
Director of the Oxford International
Biomedical Centre