Comment by Doug Everingham
Hume's Pasteur Exposed is faulty if Rob McKinnon-Lower quotes it rightly (GLW, October 20). Pasteur did not plagiarise from Bechamp's . Partridge's Origins derives microbe from mikros small bios life, and the scientific word components -zyme, zymo- (of/ by/ with ferment/ enzyme) from zume leaven.
But Bechamp's zymas do far more than any enzyme. He claims they procreate, something no molecules except DNA have been shown to do in fact. Another odd thing about his procreating molecules: they aren't chemicals. This gives either chemical or molecule an unexplained meaning new to me.
I wasn't taught that Pasteur claimed all life came from germs of the air or that he ignored germs of the soil. He did claim specific germs originate specific diseases.
This has helped in managing accepted "specific" infections, those which fairly reliably meet Koch's four postulates: the germ (1) is present in each case of the disease, (2) can be isolated and grown separately, (3) reproduces the disease in a susceptible victim and (4) can be recovered from that victim. Processes that look clear-cut may on occasion be due to some other than the widely apparent cause. This applies to some degree in all scientific observations, because all rely on theories of cause and effect.
Different specific germs (or other environmental factors) may produce similar specific diseases. A virus may spread to epidemic proportions in filling a faulty environmental niche left by the widespread rout of bacteria sensitive to widely used antibiotics. It may turn out that the near-defeat of syphilis has contributed to the upsurge of HIV, but there are perhaps more persuasive examples in pneumonia and meningoencephalitis. This does nothing to validate microzyma theory, or to disprove that specific germs are a factor in at least a proportion of specific diseases.
Orthodox authorities agree that vaccination damages people. This in no way validates Bechamp. Originally "vaccination" meant only using live cowpox (vaccinia) exudates to give cross-immunity to smallpox, which much more deeply scarred exposed skin and had a disastrously higher death rate than cowpox.
Bechamp seems to have said that the claimed specific germ may or may not be produced by an illness, but is never a cause; the only causes are the constitution (presumably of the victim) and the "soil" or organic surroundings which turn the function of the microzyma from well to ill. Orthodoxy agrees that these factors occur, but would substitute interaction between victim and environment, including microbial environment, instead of the unseen, unshown, undefined microzyma. To make germs a possible effect but never a cause of disease is as logical as making pests an effect but never the cause of farming failures.
A global cowpox vaccination campaign some 20 years ago ousted the last smallpox — the first example of successful deliberate extinction of a species. This vindicates what Creighton in the 1885 Encyclopedia Britannica called "grotesque superstition".
Archie Kalokerinos has saved children from immunisation damage or death not so much by ceasing immunisation as by deferring it till he controlled some immune deficiency, evidenced e.g. by chronic infection and/or malnutrition.
He may or may not have shown a racial genetic susceptibility or poor immune responses to some vaccines and/or diseases. This would not be surprising. Isolated communities, including Aborigines, have been decimated by diseases first brought to them by colonisers who had mild reactions to the germs or were merely carriers. This is no evidence that microzymas exist.
AIDS may subside, or be eradicated in some early cases at great cost. There are deaths that fit the picture of AIDS, for example cancer or pneumonia, that may or may not go with HIV or other features of AIDS; lots of diseases are non-infective and all are a product of constitution and environment. None of this proves that HIV never or seldom causes AIDS or that non-specific microzymas are more likely to do the damage.
Despite slowly growing pollution, immunisation is also spreading and its target diseases receding.