ViroLIEgy 101: How "Viruses" Fail to Satisfy Koch's Postulates
Mike Stone from ViroLIEgy breaks down the scam of "Viruses"
I am starting a series of posts under the heading ViroLIEgy 101 in order to provide relatively short (by my standards) and concise explanations of key concepts regarding both germ “theory” and virology. I'm providing an overview on topics that are essential to the conversation that people may be confused with and have difficulty understanding, or areas that seem to be controversial when engaging in discussions with those defending the germ “theory” of disease.
In this inaugural edition of ViroLIEgy 101, I am focusing on Koch's Postulates as they remain a sticking point for many. These criteria, developed and popularized by German bacteriologist Robert Koch during the late 1800s, are largely considered necessary to satisfy in order to prove that any microbe can cause disease. However, depending on who is asked or what source one turns to, there are ways in which those defending the germ “theory” have attempted to bypass these postulates using various excuses, such as claiming that the postulates are old and outdated, or that they refer only to bacteria rather than “viruses.” Let's take a closer look at these postulates in order to see why they are just as relevant and essential today as they were when Robert Koch originally proposed them.
According to Merriam-Webster, a postulate is defined as a hypothesis that is advanced as an essential presupposition, condition, or premise of a train of reasoning. Taking this a step further, it is a logical statement that is assumed true so that a conclusion can be drawn. Postulates do not require any proof as what they state is obvious and stems from common sense.
At the time that German bacteriologist Robert Koch began devising his own logic-based postulates in the late 1870s that would eventually go on to become the standard by which to prove a microbe causes a disease, different aspects of these same logical requirements already existed. In some instances, Koch's Postulates are referred to as the Henle-Koch Postulates as a version of these same criteria had already been proposed by Koch's teacher, German pathologist Friedrich Gustav Jacob Henle. Koch would later modify and go on to popularize them. Henle was one of the early adopters of the unpopular idea that microbes caused disease, stating in his 1840 paper “Von den Miasmen und Contagien und von den miasmatisch-contagiösen Krankheiten” that the “material of contagions is not only an organic but a living one and is indeed endowed with a life of its own, which is, in relation to the diseased body, a parasitic organism.” According to Koch's Postulates in Relation to the Work of Jacob Henle and Edwin Klebs, it is said that Henle knew that just finding an organism in a diseased host was not enough to prove causation. The only way to prove the “contagious” nature was to isolate (i.e. separate one thing from everything else) the microbe from the fluids and study it independently. However, Henle felt that this was an impossibility.
“In a discussion published in 1840, Jacob Henle, who was also a pathological anatomist, proposed a criterion for identifying external disease causes. This criterion conformed perfectly with the general strategy that Virchow subsequently discussed. Henle conjectured that many diseases may be caused by parasitic micro-organisms. However, he noted that even if one regularly found living organisms in contagious fluids within diseased bodies, one could still not infer that the organisms were more than harmless saprophytes. The contagion could still be the fluids themselves rather than the organisms. According to Henle, "one could prove empirically that [the organisms] were really effective only if one could isolate...the contagious organisms from the contagious fluids, and then observe the powers of each separately." Henle was sceptical about the possibility of carrying out such a proof, and apparently he never tried to do so.”
In addition to Henle's influence on Koch, it is stated that Edwin Klebs, a disciple of the father of modern pathology Rudolf Virchow (ironically, a disbeliever in germ theory), had set forth similar criteria in the early 1870s. Klebs noted that a microbe must be isolated to induce other cases of “infection” and then be observed acting upon the host. He felt that one could infer a causal relationship if different pathological processes, such as inflammation, were noted. As his papers were widely known and discussed, and Koch regularly cited Klebs work, it is argued that Koch was influenced by Klebs own logic-based approach.
In his 1872 paper, Klebs observed that "tracing the invasion and the course of the micro-organisms can make causality probable, but the crucial experiment is to isolate the efficient cause and allow it to operate on the organism." In 1875, he observed that if one could show that "inflammation and other reactive changes follow, step by step, the spread of the schistomycetes, then it is logical to infer a causal relation rather than a simple coincidence." Klebs pointed out that experimental evidence could support the same conclusion. To obtain such evidence, one must "isolate substances from the body and use them to induce further cases of infection." Klebs claimed to have followed both approaches and to have obtained mutually supporting results. His papers and his procedures for establishing causality were widely known and discussed.”
“When I die, let a deadly bacterial genus be named after me in my honor.” - Edwin Klebs (probably said this)
If we contrast Edwin Klebs own postulates with Robert Koch’s, we can see that the steps that Klebs outlined are very similar to what Koch proposed in 1890 while speaking to the Tenth International Congress of Medicine in Berlin. They both dealt with observation, isolation, and experimentation.
Edwin Klebs Postulates 1877
Anatomical investigations of diseased organs
The isolation and cultivation of disease germs
The initiation of new cases of the same disease by conveying germs to healthy animals
Robert Koch's Original Postulates 1890
The parasite occurs in every case of the disease in question, and under circumstances which can account for the pathological changes and clinical course of the disease
After being fully isolated from the body and repeatedly grown in pure culture, can induce the disease anew
It occurs in no other disease as a fortuitous and nonpathogenic parasite
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