Robert Koch's Anthrax Disease

During the second half of the nineteenth century, Robert Koch, a German physician, was the first person to demonstrate that a certain kind of bacterium was the cause for a specific disease. Koch had studied anthrax disease in sheep, a common disease for livestock in Germany, and he realized that specific rod-shaped bacteria were characteristically present in the cells of the infected animals. He decided to isolate these bacteria, which he labeled them as Bacillus anthracis, and grew them in a new culture medium (1). Then he inoculated this pure culture into a healthy animal. When the animal consequently developed symptoms of anthrax, he isolated the bacteria from the cells of the newly infected animal and examined them to confirm that they …show more content…
Many drawbacks to this postulate pop up immediately. The reason is that many organisms could persist long after recovery from the clinical disease. Therefore, an organism B for example, may still exist and could be isolated when a person develops another disease due to organism F. Another scenario occurs when a person is infected by organism B but does not show any symptoms, and at a same time, that person is also infected by organism F, which is truly responsible for those similar clinical symptoms. Another situation could be when organism B lives in a silent state until organism F infects that person, and produce a disease which also reactivated organism B to become an active state without producing any symptoms. Parasitic infections like herpes, malaria or viruses could demonstrate these three cases. Besides that, many organisms could cause several different disease conditions. For example, the bacterium Streptococcus pyogenes could cause several diseases such as scarlet fever, erysipelas, and not just only sore throat (2). Therefore, the bacteria that Koch has isolated did not only cause anthrax, but it may also the source for other