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The Koch Postulates
"One of the landmarks in the study of infectious diseases was the development of the Henle-Koch postulates of causation. They were originally drawn up for bacteria and protozoa, but were revised in 1937 by Rivers and again in 1982 by Evans in attempts to accommodate the special problem of proving disease causation by viruses. The problem is still difficult, especially when viruses are considered as causative of chronic diseases (including several of the hepatitides), neoplastic diseases, and slowly progressive neurological diseases. Because most such diseases cannot be reproduced in experimental animals, virologists have had to evaluate causation indirectly via 'guilt by association'..."
Fields Virology, p23 (1996) source...
AIDS; WORDS FROM THE FRONT
By Anthony Liversidge / Spin Aug. 1991
Extract: Gallo agrees that HIV does not meet the requirements of Koch's postulates, the rules framed by the German bacteriologist Robert Koch a century ago to pin down the cause of a disease. Gallo reasons they must be out of date. It is hard to see why, since they are rules of logic, hardly more than common sense. Koch only suggested that if possible, a suspected cause has to be found in every case of the disease, and then, when taken out and injected into a healthy animal, produce the disease again.
Koch's ghost haunts Gallo, who actually invents a whole new Koch postulate in order to prove Koch wrong - that "in every case where we find the germ, we find the disease." None of the standard reference works list this rule, and it seems unlikely that Koch, who discovered the tuberculosis bacillus, didn't appreciate that it inhabits many more people than come down with the disease (in fact, probably most of us carry it).
In fact, a few pages on, seemingly forgetting what he said earlier, Gallo writes that "the asymptomatic carrier and subclinical infections [are] known for almost every microbe. We learned this in the century since Koch, and actually Koch knew it himself. Think of how many people get exposed to and infected from Koch's TB bacterium and never get sick!"
What emerges is that Gallo is defeated by the same inconsistencies in HIV-think that bother his critics. He really can't answer the awkward question of why AIDS is still overwhelmingly concentrated (91 percent) in men in the U.S., whereas in Haiti and Africa it has always been equally distributed between the sexes. Speculating wildly, Gallo conjures up, among other things, "ritualistic voodoo practices." source...
CHIRON AND THE VIRUS THAT NEVER WAS
“Koch's first postulate, of course, demands that a truly harmful virus be found in huge quantities in every single patient.
His second postulate requires that the virus particles be isolated and grown, although this supposed hepatitis virus has never been found intact.
And the third postulate insists that newly infected animals, such as chimpanzees, should get the disease when injected with the virus. This hypothetical microbe fails all three tests. But Koch's standards were the furthest thing from the minds of the Chiron scientists when they announced in 1987 that they had finally found the "hepatitis C" virus.” source...
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