Word: nasality
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...first sign of an upper-respiratory infection--I'm too congested to think straight. All I want to do for the next five days is sink into a warm bed or drown in a vat of chicken soup. So I was intrigued early last week by reports of a nasal spray, called Zicam, that is supposed to keep a cold from lasting more than a day and a half. Even though the results sounded too good to be true, I thought they were worth a closer look...
What Zicam, which sells for $9 to $12 a bottle, has going for it is a simple idea for preventing cold viruses from attacking the nasal passages. Four years ago, a report in the Annals of Internal Medicine suggested that hapless snifflers could cut a cold's duration almost in half by sucking on foul-tasting zinc lozenges. That's because zinc ions are about the same size and shape as the molecular doorway through which one major group of cold viruses, called the rhinoviruses (rhino for "nose"), breaks into the nasal cells. Coat those viruses with zinc, and they...
...Jack Gwaltney of the University of Virginia School of Medicine, a top cold researcher. "Wash your hands a lot with soap and water," he says, because cold viruses like to linger there. Don't put your fingers in your eyes or nose, as they give easy access to the nasal passages...
...ever aware of it, but one nostril is always pulling in a tiny bit more air than the other, the result of minute swelling in the nasal lining that switches from one side to the other every few hours. The phenomenon has seemed to be little more than an anatomical curiosity...
...team of researchers based in the U.S. and Israel has shown otherwise. From animal studies, the scientists knew that some odors are detected more easily when they're flowing past nasal tissue quickly, and others when they're moving slowly. So the researchers tested human subjects with a mix of two chemicals, asking them to sniff through one nostril, then the other. Sure enough, as reported in last week's issue of Nature, the sniffers thought they were smelling different mixtures when they were really just getting a different olfactory take on a single mixture...