A germ theory of chronic disease
Ever since I read Camus' "The Plague", I have been fascinated by microbes and the effect that they have had on human history.
An article in the February 1999 Atlantic called "The New Germ Theory" by Judith Hooper profiles the theories of Paul Ewald. Ewald is the author of "Plague Time: How Stealth Infections Are Causing Cancers, Heart Disease, and Other Deadly Ailments", published in November 2000, and "The New Germ Theory of Disease", published in January 2002. His premise, as capsulized by Hooper in the article, is that some of humanity's most difficult chronic diseases will turn out to be caused by infectious pathogens. The theory posits that such neurologic diseases as Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease may be late-life manifestations of an early exposure to an unknown infectious agent, just as shingles (herpes zoster) is a late-life disease caused by early exposure to the varicella (chickenpox) virus. This was no more than an intriguing theory and fodder for further speculation (by me) and research (by others) until I came across this story, originally published in the Vancouver Sun, revealing that Michael J. Fox is one of four people who have now been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease and who all appeared together in the late 1970s in a Canadian situation comedy called "Leo and Me", just before his "Family Ties" days.
And on the way to finding the links for the above, I came across Bookchin and Schumacher's "The Virus and the Vaccine", published in the Atlantic in February 2000, which describes the simian SV40 virus. This is an agent which has been associated with "a number of rare human cancers", and which was found to have contaminated 98 million doses of the polio vaccine administered to Americans between 1955 and 1963. The intro says, "Federal health officials see little reason for concern. A growing cadre of medical researchers disagree". Interesting stuff.
11:38:28 PM 
|
|
