![]() ![]() Hardened positions, which leave little room for uncertainty and nuance, undermine public trust as various assertions prove wrong. ![]() The debates over COVID-19 and the arguments of the past, in which different sides have failed to perceive the possibility that they might not have the whole story, may hold vitally important lessons for President-elect Biden’s COVID-19 task force. As in the cholera wars of the 1890s, different theories about the spread of COVID-19 and methods for reducing the death rate have been marked not only by by scientific conflicts, but also by an increasing distrustful public, political upheavals and even riots. His theories would also influence our understanding of the importance of environmental factors to public health.Īll of this history should sound uncomfortably familiar to anyone who has been following the course of COVID-19’s murderous path through different populations and locations and the bitter debates about how to stop it. As Paul de Kruif wrote in his famous 1926 book Microbe Hunters, “Murderous germs are everywhere, sneaking into all of us, yet they are able to assassinate only some of us.” Over the years, Koch’s postulates regarding infection would undergo several modifications, as it became clear that pathogens need a vulnerable host in order to cause serious harm, as von Pettenkofer predicted. But while von Pettenkofer was wrong about how cholera was transmitted, he was right that a germ alone is often insufficient to account for infection, disease and death. ![]() Only a handful of residents died in nearby Altona, which filtered its water through sand. Von Pettenkofer would be proven tragically wrong about cholera’s route of transmission when the city of Hamburg decided not to filter the city’s water, leading to nearly 9,000 deaths. Several days later he reported that not only did he not die, he suffered no lasting effects. Von Pettenkofer swallowed the vial’s contents before witnesses. Koch complied with a vial swarming with cholera bacilli. Anxious to prove his theory that germs alone don’t account for disease, and in the midst of one of the deadliest cholera pandemics of the 1800s, Von Pettenkofer, asked Koch to send him live cholera germs. Von Pettenkofer and his localists believed that cholera was inhaled as a miasma, which arose from earth contaminated by sewage. Koch and his fellow contagionists maintained that the bacterium was spread through the water. The battle between the two men exploded into a bitter divide over the question of the infectivity of cholera. Von Pettenkofer asserted that germs could only cause disease in the presence of a “local” or environmental factor. Von Pettenkofer, the founder of the Institute of Hygiene in Munich, disputed Koch’s germ theory of disease, which held that a germ is both necessary and sufficient to cause illness. When Max von Pettenkofer shot himself to death in 1901, he left behind a storied career as a hygienist and bitter opponent of Robert Koch, the German physician and microbiologist who discovered the cholera bacillus, Vibrio cholerae. ![]()
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