Blame it on the bug - By Kim Otteby

As we’re all aware, there are lots of infectious agents like bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites floating around, especially here in Africa. Now, a lot of the time when we get infected by one of these microbes we automatically blame the bug for getting ill. And this is of course what a large part of modern medicine is based on – some foreign thing causes us to become ill, and hence we need to kill it.

It all started with a man (whom you may already be familiar with) named Louis Pasteur. Well he was the one who proposed that germs cause disease and hence generated the idea that disease could be beaten and health restored by destroying the outside agent, i.e. the germ. And so we entered the era of “Drug for a Bug”.

Now this approach has produced a lot of positive results, especially with the discovery of antibiotics. Today, 50,000 tonnes of antibiotics are used each year! Yet deaths from infectious diseases are ever increasing, even in developed countries. In fact, infectious diseases in Europe and the US have doubled in the last decade.

But can we really put all the blame on the bugs? Lets take a step back for a minute and take a closer look at Pasteur and the Germ Theory. What most of us don’t know about Pasteur is that throughout his career he often doubted his assumptions and indeed on his deathbed he even recanted saying that the germ theory was all wrong and that his contemporary  Claude Bernard had been right all along in saying “The terrain is everything, the germ is nothing”.

So what does that mean? Well basically it means that it’s the state of your body, i.e. the terrain, that determines whether you’re going to get ill or not, not the germ.

Claude Bernard, who was one of the leading physiologists of his day and indeed is considered the founder of experimental medicine, was convinced that the germ theory was wrong. To prove it, he took a big glass of water, filled it with Cholera bacteria, and in front of a group of doctors, top scientists and some of his university students, he raised his glass, made the statement “The terrain is everything, the germ is nothing”, and then drank it all down.

There are not many scientists who are willing to risk their own lives on a theory, but he did. And what’s more, he did it on several different occasions, using numerous different bacteria. He never got ill.

Nowadays we are so focused on combat medicine where we’re constantly trying to kill – kill that bug, kill that parasite – when perhaps maybe we should spend some of this time looking at the terrain. Most people simply assume that the terrain is the immune system. But that’s actually not correct. The immune system is merely a backup system that takes over when your terrain fails. The terrain is your body, your cells, your tissues, your organs. So that’s what we need to concern ourselves with first and foremost if we want to remain healthy and free of disease.