In a post on September 21, 2003, I listed some research suggesting that spirochetes may be causal in MS --- "Acute plaques in multiple sclerosis, their pathogenic significance and the role of spirochaetes as etiological factor." by Dr. Gabriel Steiner in the Journal of Neuropathology, 11:343-72. 1952 -- and posed the question of why this research from the 1950s has been ignored.
Yesterday while reading Plague Time by Paul Ewald (New York: Free Press, 2000) pages 99-101, I noticed a similar example of lost medical knowledge; apparently, the supposedly recent discovery of the bacterium that causes stomach ulcers was known about from 1874 until the nineteen fifties, when it was dropped from medical education.
From Paul Ewald: In 1874, Arthur Boettcher, a microbe hunter, published a paper on a small, curved bacterium that he found repeatedly in stomach ulcers. Over the next fifty years, others confirmed the findings, even experimentally transmitting the bacterium to lab animals. In the late 1940s peptic ulcers were being successfully treated with antibiotics, Aureomycin (chlortetracycline), in New York hospitals. Then, around 1950, discussion of infectious causation of ulcers disappeared from the literature and the treatment regimen. Medical texts from 1950 through early 1990s attributed peptic ulcers to gastric acidity, smoking, acohol consumption, and genetic preidspositions--anything but infection. Around 1980, after three decades of medical impotence against ulcers, a young internist in Perth, Australia named Barry Marshall noticed the curved bacteria in tissue samples of ulcer patients. Microbiologists found the bacilli in all their duodenal ulcer patients and 80% of peptic ulcers. In 1982 they cultured Helicobacter pylori "It is not clear why almost all medical experts ignored for four decades the evidence that ulcers could be caused by infection." (page 100).
Paul Ewald is a professor of biology at Amherst College. He was the first recipient of the George E. Burch Fellowship in Theoretic Medicine and Affiliated Sciences, and he conceived a new discipline, evolutionary medicine. He is the author of Evolution of Infectious Disease.
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