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disease when introduced into a healthy noticed that a group of people were getting sick As soon
organism. in a new way. Because the symptoms of the sick
4. The microorganism must be re-isolated people resembled those of pneumonia, some of as the
from the inoculated (now diseased) experi- the original ill patients were given antibiotics. Chinese
mental host and identified as identical to the When the patients didn’t improve with antibiotic medical
original specific causative agent. therapy, doctors concluded that this new type authorities
of pneumonia must be caused by a new type
If all four conditions are met, one has of virus. suspected an
proven the infectious cause for a specific set As soon as the Chinese medical authorities outbreak of
of symptoms. Significantly, however, even suspected an outbreak of a new and dangerous a new and
Koch could not find proof of contagion using viral disease, they should have taken steps to
his own postulates! In fact, he had to abandon satisfy the Rivers’ postulates. The first step dangerous
the requirement of the first postulate when he would have entailed collecting some five hun- viral disease,
discovered carriers of cholera and typhoid fever dred people from Wuhan with the identical (or they should
who did not get sick. Although he claimed to at least nearly identical) symptoms and finding
have proven that a bacterium causes tuberculosis five hundred symptom-free matched controls have taken
(TB), a careful reading of his work (very difficult (people of similar age, lifestyle, disease profile steps to
to obtain in English) shows that he did not satisfy and so forth), also from Wuhan. Given the pos- satisfy the
even one of his four postulates for TB. sible slow development of this illness, it would
Koch developed his postulates for bacteria, also have been prudent to follow the five hun- Rivers’
not for viruses. In 1937, Thomas M. Rivers dred controls for a few months to make sure that postulates.
modified Koch’s postulates in order to deter- none developed the new symptoms.
mine the infectious nature of viruses. Rivers’ The next step would have been to do a thor-
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postulates stated: ough microbiological examination of a variety
of fluids taken from the one thousand subjects.
1. The virus could be isolated from diseased At a minimum, this should have included
hosts. blood, sputum, urine and nasal swabs. The
2. The virus could be cultivated in host cells. study should have used both conventional light
3. The virus could be filtered from a medium microscopy (to look for bacteria) and electron
that also contained bacteria (proof of filter- microscopy (to look for viruses). If the inves-
ability). tigators went on to find a novel bacterium or
4. The filtered virus would produce a compa- virus in all of the sick people and in none of the
rable disease when the cultivated virus was well people, they then should have meticulously
used to infect experimental animals. isolated, purified and cultured the bacterium or
5. The virus could be re-isolated from the virus in a neutral medium. After accomplish-
infected experimental animal. ing this purification step, the purified microbe
6. A specific immune response to the virus should have been introduced into test animals,
could be detected. using the normal route by which the microbe
could spread (and not, for example, injecting it
Note that Rivers dropped Koch’s first pos- directly into the brain of the animal, as was done
tulate—that’s because many people suffering to “prove” the contagious etiology of polio).
from “viral” illness do not harbor the offending Finally, such studies would of course require a
microorganism. Even with Koch’s first postulate control group of test animals; in other words,
missing, however, researchers have never been if researchers are going to spray purified virus
able to prove that a specific virus causes a spe- into animals’ nostrils to see if they get sick, they
cific disease using Rivers’ postulates. also need to spray pure saline into the nostrils
of a control group of animals to make sure the
WHAT SCIENTISTS IN WUHAN animals are not getting sick just because stuff
DID NOT DO is being sprayed up their noses.
Sometime in late 2019, authorities in China Any sane person would agree that such

SUMMER 2020 Wise Traditions 21