Germ Theory of Disease, Satisfactory Demonstration, Benedict Prevost, First Proof, Spontaneous Generation, Cause of Disease

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Your Ad Here	Germ Theory of Disease Though strong arguments for the germ theory of disease (diseases are caused by living organisms) were given by many earlier workers but all were mostly speculative. The first satisfactory demonstration of the probable causal relationship of organisms to disease was given by Benedict Prevost (1807) in plants. He proved conclusively that bunt disease of wheat is caused by a fungus. Though Prevost's experiments provided the first proof and interpretation of the role of a microorganism in the causation of a disease (i.e. the germ theory of disease), his findings were ahead of his time and were rejected by almost all his contemporaries who believed in spontaneous generation of microorganisms and of disease and that the microorganisms and their spores were the result rather than the cause of disease.
The discovery that bacteria can act as specific agents of infectious disease in animals was made through the study of anthrax disease. c.J. Davaine (1863 and 1868) showed that bacteria are invariably present in diseased animals but are undetectable in healthy ones and that the disease can be transmitted to healthy animals by inoculation with blood containing these bacteria but he could not prove whether these bacteria were the cause of result of the disease. Somewhat later, Robert Koch (1876) solved the problem and confirmed the germ theory of disease by conclusive demonstration of the bacterial causation, or etiology, of anthrax disease. By a series of experiments on anthrax disease of cattle, he showed that the spores of anthrax bacilli isolated from pure cultures could infect animals and thus demonstrated that germ grown outside a body could cause disease and that specific microorganisms caused specific diseases.
Finally in 1882, to establish cause and effect relationship between a given microorganism and a specific disease, Koch described some steps necessary to identify the causative agent of a disease. These steps are popularly known as Koch's Postulates which is even today used in animal and plant pathology. In fact the "step" were the ideas of Jacob Henie who proposed during 1840s that to establish the etiology of a specific disease, the agent would have to be found regularly in the host during the disease, the agent would have to be isolated, and the isolated agent would have to be shown capable of producing the disease. Koch, however, first applied these ideas experimentally and established their validity.	Your Ad Here

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