Germs Don't Cause Disease, We Do

If germs are the primary cause of disease, it’s a wonder most of us stay well despite constant exposure. They are everywhere—on every surface, in every breath, in our food, water, and even within us. One E. coli bacterium—an ordinary resident of the human gut—can produce over four billion offspring overnight. A single gram of soil contains more than a billion microorganisms. Air, water, and earth are alive with them.
 
Yet we live on, not because we sterilize toilet seats, scrub with antiseptic soaps, or wear face masks, but because our bodies are designed to live in harmony with them.
 
 
WE SURVIVE IN A SEA OF GERMS
Billions of people who fear germs, line up to kiss the same religious icons and take communion wafers from bare-handed priests, and remain perfectly well.

Creatures in the wild thrive amid filth. Rabbits eat their feces, vultures eat rotting carcasses, and dogs will gleefully roll in the most putrid, decaying material they can find and then lick themselves clean. Children repeatedly have their fingers in their mouths after wallowing on the floor or in the mud, playing in the toilet, or exploring the garbage pail, and somehow survive.
 
In earlier times, some religious traditions taught that caring for the body was indulgent and distracted from care of the soul. Dirtiness became a badge of holiness. Until relatively recently, a bath once a year was considered plenty in Western society. Lack of bathing is still common in many parts of the world, and without the epidemics that our germ-fearing culture would predict.
 
Millions wipe themselves with their fingers (usually with the left hand, a reason it's customary to shake with the right) and yet live in societies that rank higher on health scores than nations with bidets, perfumed toilet paper, disinfectant aerosols, and antiseptic soaps.
 
 
GERMS ARE NECESSARY
Microorganisms are required for our survival. Without bacteria to consume garbage, we would have long ago been smothered under organic refuse. Beneficial microbes on the skin, in the mouth, and in the intestinal tract help keep potentially harmful species in check. Over fifty percent of the dry weight of feces is comprised of microorganisms. The number of these in the digestive tract outnumbers the total cells in the body by 100 to 1.
 
Herbivores cannot survive without microorganisms in their digestive tracts that break down plant material and produce protein and other essential nutrients.
 
Experiments with chicks raised in sterile (gnotobiotic) environments show that eliminating bacteria, including Salmonella pathogens, increases mortality. Their immune systems fail to develop properly without microbial exposure. Health returned only after feeding them droppings from their mother hens--rich in the very microbes scientists had tried to eliminate.
 
 
WHY THE GREAT PLAGUES ENDED
It’s often claimed that medicine conquered the great epidemics of history. But historical data show declining mortality in many infectious diseases before vaccines and antibiotics appeared. This was likely due to improved nutrition, sanitation, and living conditions. Modern medicines arrived as the tide was already receding.

GERMS CAN BE SCAVENGERS OR PREDATORS
Pathogenic organisms can be found in the healthy, diseased, or dead. That's because they are normally at work helping to decompose digestive material and debris from the 70 billion cells that die each day in a human.
 
The mere presence of a pathogen does not prove it caused disease, any more than crows on road kill proves they caused the death. Correlation is not causation.
 
Predators choose the easiest meal-- the weak or disabled. Likewise, pathogenic germs can be predatory and exploit weakened bodies. In health, the internal environment keeps them in check; in weakness, it becomes their feast.
 
 
THE SPANISH FLU LESSON
The exact cause of the 1918 influenza pandemic remains a topic of debate, and early transmission studies produced puzzling results. 

In 1918, the U.S. Public Health Service conducted experiments on 118 healthy volunteers. They inhaled the breath of flu patients, were coughed on directly, had mucus and nasal secretions from the sick swabbed into their throats and noses, and even had those secretions injected into their blood. Not one volunteer fell ill.
 
The U.S. Surgeon General and other government and military agencies recommended extremely high doses of aspirin to treat the flu — up to 30 grams per day (about 100 standard 325 mg tablets). Today, doses above 4 grams per day are known to be toxic and reproduce the very symptoms attributed to the flu. Salicylates and Pandemic Influenza Mortality, 1918–1919 Pharmacology, Pathology, and Historic Evidence
 
Analyses of 1918 autopsy reports reveal findings consistent with aspirin poisoning. Lungs filled with fluid, but no signs of lung infection were found.
 
Wartime stress, malnutrition, and aggressive medical treatments likely worsened outcomes—creating a tragedy influenced as much by human factors as by infectious agents.
 
 
IT'S UP TO US
While microorganisms exist in and all around us, our lifestyle choices, nutrition, and environment largely determine how our bodies respond to them.
 
We either create the environment for health, or prepare the banquet for disease. The choice is ours.