Fear of the Invisible
by Janine Roberts, Bristol: Impact Investigative Media Productions, 2nd ed., 2009, 314 pages
• Germ theory of disease
• Vaccine hazards and toxins
• Have viruses been isolated?
• HIV/AIDS: a deadly scandal
• Cells, viruses and health
In Fear of the Invisible, investigative journalist Janine Roberts describes her 12-year exploration of many fields of ‘big medicine’. Beginning as a firm believer in the official theory of harmful viral invaders and the effectiveness of vaccines, she was dismayed by what she discovered, and eventually arrived at a broader and very different perspective on the causes of disease. She writes:
We have been taught to greatly fear viruses, yet scientists have long known that these are fundamental parts of life, made by the millions by all healthy cells. I hope this book will help by combating this fear, this damning of the invisible because we do not understand it. Without this fear, hopefully the focus in medical research will shift to the environmental toxins that really do put us, and our world, gravely at risk. (p. xi)
Germ theory of disease
The prevailing view today is that major illnesses are caused by microbes – i.e. bacteria and viruses. One of the first advocates of this ‘germ theory’ was Girolamo Fracastoro of Venice, who in 1546 blamed diseases on minute, rapidly multiplying, infectious organisms. Since the microscope had not yet been invented, his theory could not be substantiated. The microscope was invented in the 17th century and led to the discovery of the cell, and also of bacteria – singled-celled microorganisms which, since they have no cell nucleus, are classed as prokaryotes.
Bacteria are typically a few micrometres (thousandths of a millimetre) in length, while
viruses range from 10 to 300 nanometres (millionths of a millimetre) in diameter.
The terms ‘virus’ and ‘vaccination’ were first used in the 18th century. Cows (‘vacca’ in Latin, hence ‘vaccination’) suffer from a mild form of smallpox called cowpox, and a scientist called Edward Jenner heard of a rural belief that people who got cowpox never seemed to be affected by the much more serious smallpox. So he took pus from an open sore on the hand of a milkmaid whose cow had cowpox, and injected it into his gardener’s son in the hope that it would protect him against smallpox. He called the pus his ‘virus’, a Latin word meaning ‘poisonous fluid’. He claimed it was pure and uncontaminated, but we now know it would have contained many kinds of microbes and toxins.
In 1800 a doctor attacked Jenner’s method because of its failures, but Jenner claimed that these must be due to contaminated needles being used to inject his cowpox virus. The UK government made his smallpox vaccine compulsory in 1853, but thousands of parents preferred to be fined or imprisoned rather than give it to their children, as it frequently produced illness. Although Jenner is credited with inventing vaccination, he had learned of it from a milkmaid. The Chinese had practised something similar, but somewhat subtler, for 3000 years: they recommended sniffing powdered smallpox scabs to induce immunity to smallpox.
In the 19th century, Louis Pasteur further developed the germ theory. His description of microorganisms in milk led to the ‘pasteurization’ process named after him. He was also given credit for developing anthrax, cholera and rabies vaccines, and researched how to reduce the virulence of ‘germs’ for use in vaccines. Another French scientist, Antoine Béchamp, had actually discovered that airborne microorganisms caused fermentation in wine and milk six years before Pasteur, and accused him of plagiarism. Instead of seeing these microorganisms primarily as our enemies, he stressed their emergence from our own cells and their value to us, regarding them as the consequence of disease and cell death rather than their cause. Pasteur put more emphasis on their role in illnesses and received credit for establishing the germ theory, but he too depicted bacteria primarily as useful.
The prevailing modern idea of microbes as pathogenic invaders that we must destroy at any cost owes a lot to the Prussian physician Robert Koch, who was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1905 for linking tuberculosis (TB) to a mycobacterium. He formulated the four ‘Koch postulates’ which are still taught today and embody his belief that there is one microbe per disease: 1. the microbe must be present in every case of the disease; 2. the microbe must be isolated from the host and grown in vitro (i.e. in the laboratory); 3. the disease must be produced when a pure culture of the microbe is inoculated into a healthy susceptible host; 4. the same microbe must be recovered from the experimentally infected host. However, Koch found it difficult to fulfil all four postulates. We now know that nearly everyone has the tuberculosis mycobacterium in them, along with fungi that cause a deadly pneumonia (PCP), and countless other microbes, but they are normally harmless unless our immune system is impaired by other factors.
Mycobacterium tuberculosis. (en.wikipedia.org)
Koch rightly criticized Pasteur’s description of liquid samples taken from diseased patients as ‘isolates’ of particular microbes, saying that they could not possibly contain only one kind of pathogen. For instance, he wrote of the Pasteur rabies vaccine: ‘Pasteur is content to inoculate with slime taken from the nose of the dead animal, which, exactly like saliva, was certainly contaminated with many other bacteria’ (p. 43). He also noted that different bacteria could cause similar disease symptoms.
In 1909 Karl Landsteiner and Erwin Popper began their hunt for the cause of polio, in response to major epidemics of paralytic polio in Sweden and the United States. They were unable to find a bacterium to blame so they guessed that there must be minute forms of bacteria able to pass through all available filters. They called them ‘mini-bacteria’ and ‘viruses’. Viruses are about a billionth of the size of a cell, and anything equally small will pass through the filters with them, including DNA and RNA fragments, proteins, prions (infectious agents composed mainly of protein), mycoplasmas (tiny parasitic bacteria lacking a cell wall), and chemical toxins. This problem of isolating or purifying viruses is crucial to the rest of this story. Most viral ‘isolates’ are little more than filtered cell cultures containing many contaminants, in which a particular virus is presumed present.
In 1931 the electron microscope was invented. When tiny particles were seen in fluid from sick people, they were called viruses. When they were seen surrounding and entering damaged cells, they were assumed to be infecting the cells and causing the cell damage. We now know that healthy cells communicate with one another by exchanging particles known as exosomes, microvesicles and retroviruses; they carry genetic material which is then absorbed by the recipient cell. Cells under stress try to defend themselves by mutating, and the exchange of viral-like particles is part of this process. This shows the need for caution in interpreting such images. But, as we shall see, scientists have failed to exercize such caution and have built the theory of pathogenic viruses on very flimsy evidence.
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