In Secretary Donna Shalala’s view, the situation depicted
by the statistics is
PASSAGE II
You would think that the common cold should be easy
enough to study, but it is not so easy as it looks. Colds often
seem to spread fromone person to another, so it is often assumed
that the cold must be infectious, but there are some puzzling
observations which do not fit in with this theory. An investigator
in Holland examined some eight thousand volunteers from
different areas and came to the conclusion that in each group
the colds all appeared at the same time – transfer of infection
from case to case could not account for that. Yet at the Common
Cold Research Unit in Salisbury the infection theory has been
tested out; two series of about two hundred people each were
inoculated, one with salt water and the other with secretions
from known cold victims. Only one of the salt-water group got a
cold, compared with seventy-three in the other group.
In the British Medical Journal the other day, there was
a report of a meeting, ‘The Common Cold -- Fact and Fancy’, at
which one of the speakers reported a study of colds made in
Cirencester over the last five years. Three hundred and fifty
volunteers had kept diary records of their colds and on an average
each had seven every year, with an annual morbidity of seventy
days. So nearly one-fifth of our lives is spent in more or less
misery, coughing and sneezing. Some widely held beliefs about
the common cold have turned out not to be true. It seems that
old people are just as liable to colds as the young. Sailors in
isolated weather ships have just as many colds while on board
and not in contact with the outside world as when on shore. It is
a truism that common illnesses pose more problems than the
rare. The rare disease is by comparison much easier to handle.
There are not so many cases and all of them have been
intensively studied. Someone has read up all the literature about
the disease and published a digest of it. There will be more facts
and fewer fancies.
Which of the following statements can be implied from
the passage?
Stress your limit with past questions and answers