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Letter: Diseases Are Not Due to Germs Alone

Posted on: Saturday, 2 July 2005, 06:00 CDT

Sir: Acquiring an infection equals infective agent plus level of immunity ('Superbug hits 15 hospitals', 30 June). Louis Pasteur favoured the germ theory whereby the infective agent was the direct cause of disease. Claude Bernard, on the other hand, believed that the internal 'terrain', or health of the immune system, was more important.

It is well established that our immune systems are compromised by poor diet, stress, pollution and inappropriate use of antibiotics. Antibiotics can cause microbial resistance and therefore more virulent microbes: they also kill off beneficial bacteria leaving the intestines open to invasion by pathogens which can become harmful to the host, causing diarrhoea and septicaemia. The diarrhoea causes loss of vital nutrients, further compromising the immune system. Therefore doctors should be prescribing probiotics, nutritional supplements and improving diets for vulnerable patients and not oversubscribing antibiotics.

On his deathbed Pasteur said: 'Bernard was right, the pathogen is nothing, the terrain is everything.' Unfortunately Pasteur's legacy is the obsession with the pathogen. Modern medicine has largely forgotten the importance of the terrain.

HELEN MURRAY

CARDIAC PHYSIOLOGIST BRIGHTON

Source: Independent, The; London (UK)

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