FW: Koch's postulates on infectious diseases

[Guest guest]

All the more reasons to do biopsy/postmortem neuronal tissue studies

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Here are Koch¹s postulates for the 21st century as suggested by Fredricks

and Relman:

1. A nucleic acid sequence belonging to a putative pathogen should be

present in most cases of an infectious disease. Microbial nucleic acids

should be found preferentially in those organs or gross anatomic sites known

to be diseased, and not in those organs that lack pathology.

2. Fewer, or no, copy numbers of pathogen-associated nucleic acid

sequences should occur in hosts or tissues without disease.

3. With resolution of disease, the copy number of pathogen-associated

nucleic acid sequences should decrease or become undetectable. With clinical

relapse, the opposite should occur.

4. When sequence detection predates disease, or sequence copy number

correlates with severity of disease or pathology, the sequence-disease

association is more likely to be a causal relationship.

5. The nature of the microorganism inferred from the available sequence

should be consistent with the known biological characteristics of that group

of organisms.

6. Tissue-sequence correlates should be sought at the cellular level:

efforts should be made to demonstrate specific in situ hybridization of

microbial sequence to areas of tissue pathology and to visible

microorganisms or to areas where microorganisms are presumed to be located.

7. These sequence-based forms of evidence for microbial causation should

be reproducible.

Btw should be a good video lecture later on, I haven't had a chance to view

it yet.

Natasa

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