Handbook for Curing the Common Cold is finally compete. How was the handbook conceived? From where did the insight come? The answers are so strange most readers will only shake their head in amazement, and disbelief. However, the pure truth, no matter how strange, is important and should be recorded. Below is the author's strange but true story of discovery, and its painful origin.

The author, Mr. George A. Eby, of Austin, Texas, was forced into biomedical research on Valentine's day in 1979 when his 3-year old daughter, Karen, was diagnosed with acute T-cell lymphocytic leukemia. On March 5, 1979, she had a bone marrow leukemic blast count of zero. One month after diagnosis, a massive proliferation of healthy reticulocytes (young red blood cells) added more evidence that her recovery was occurring at an astonishingly rapid rate. Her oncologist, Paul Zeltzer, M.D., of the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, remarked, "Mr. Eby, her blood picture has set a new standard in improvement. I wonder why. Perhaps one of those enormous vitamin and mineral supplements you have been giving her beneficially interacted with our chemotherapy. You might look into that idea, because if you stop the operative supplement, she might get worse. Who knows, and I am only guessing, but it would keep you busy."

At first Eby felt completely unable to cope with the awesome task ahead as he was not educated as a physician or scientist. Rather, Eby had a B.S. in mathematics from the University of Texas at Pan American. After a stint on the Apollo Project at Houston's NASA, he changed career fields, and graduated from Texas A&M University in 1970 with a masters degree in city planning. He practiced city planning in several Texas cities until 1979. Without any doubt, his academic and professional background was completely inadequate for the task at hand.

Using his modest mathematical and planning ability, he accepted the challenge of identifying the mystery nutrient. Eby developed a plan to sort through the many possible interactions. He used a matrix with vitamins and minerals on the Y-axis, and each of Karen's conditions on the X-axis. On the X-axis were frequent colds, primary immune anergy, absence of weight gain, extremely foul body odor, lethargy, anorexia, anemia, radiation therapy, leukemia, remissions, drug interactions and other signs and symptoms of leukemia.

After several months of library research, the matrix filled in sparsely and randomly except for the nearly full zinc line. Eby consequently focused his attention squarely on zinc as the nutrient most likely to have had the adjuvant action on Karen's chemotheraphy. Children on immunosuppressive chemotherapy often have severe common colds, so fighting colds became another priority. Taking zinc supplements seemed no more harmful, and no less reasonable than taking Vitamin C because these nutrients, as well as others, are needed by the primary T-cell immune system to fight cancer, leukemia, and viral infections. Unfortunately, giving dietary supplements of vitamin C, zinc and other nutrients did not seem useful in fighting Karen's colds.

About four months after Karen's diagnosis of leukemia, she developed a particularly severe cold. Her throat was swollen and too painful for her to swallow a zinc gluconate (50 mg zinc) tablet. Eby asked Karen to chew the tablet instead. Karen was too exhausted to chew for long, and she soon went to sleep with most of the crushed tablet remaining in her mouth. Several hours later, Karen came into the living room playing with her toys, saying, "I'm all well, Mom!" Karen, still immunosuppressed from chemotherapy, was completely over her cold. Her cold did not return, even though no subsequent treatment was given. The effects of zinc gluconate lozenges on Karen's colds were impossible for Eby to ignore.

July 1998, ADDENDUM: The complete story of the biochemistry of "Zinc and Leukemia" is now available. Zinc lozenges were first found to be effective against common colds in an immunosuppressed child suffering from leukemia.

Eby's fascination with zinc and zinc gluconate lozenges increased. Later, clinical trials verified that zinc gluconate lozenges shortened common colds. However, they lacked commercial utility because their taste was insufficiently pleasant. Fifteen years after Karen's diagnosis of leukemia, Handbook for Curing the Common Cold documents one of the most amazing, and highly neglected powers of Zn²⁺ ions.

The big question is, will zinc acetate lozenges as the cure to the common cold, the HOLY GRAIL OF MEDICINE, become widely accepted?