In Britain, the Common Cold Unit (CCU), also known as the Common Cold Research Unit (CCRU), was set up by the civilian Medical Research Council (MRC) in 1946 on the site of a former military hospital, the Harvard Hospital, at Harnham Down near Salisbury in Wiltshire. Its aim was to undertake laboratory and epidemiological research on the common cold, with a view to reducing its human and economic costs; common colds account for a third of all acute respiratory infections and the economic costs are substantial in terms of days off work.
Thirty volunteers were required every fortnight during trial periods. The unit advertised in newspapers and magazines for volunteers, who were paid a small amount. A stay at the unit was presented in these advertisements as an unusual holiday opportunity. The volunteers were infected with preparations of cold viruses and typically stayed for ten days. They were housed in small groups of two or three, with each group strictly isolated from the others during the course of the stay. Volunteers were allowed to go out for walks in the countryside south of Salisbury, but residential areas were out of bounds.
Human coronaviruses, which are responsible for about 10% of common colds, were first isolated from volunteers at the unit in 1965. The CCU continually recruited volunteers for research into the common cold until its closure in 1989.
The CCU was sometimes confused with the Microbiological Research Establishment at nearby Porton Down, with which it occasionally collaborated but was not officially connected.
Read more about Common Cold Unit: Sources
Famous quotes containing the words common, cold and/or unit:
“When we consider what, to use the words of the catechism, is the chief end of man, and what are the true necessaries and means of life, it appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode of living because they preferred it to any other. Yet they honestly think there is no choice left. But alert and healthy natures remember that the sun rose clear. It is never too late to give up our prejudices.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.”
—Seamus Heaney (b. 1939)
“During the Suffragette revolt of 1913 I ... [urged] that what was needed was not the vote, but a constitutional amendment enacting that all representative bodies shall consist of women and men in equal numbers, whether elected or nominated or coopted or registered or picked up in the street like a coroner’s jury. In the case of elected bodies the only way of effecting this is by the Coupled Vote. The representative unit must not be a man or a woman but a man and a woman.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)