Sara Ashley O’Brien at WSJ:
Why do people get sick? Ask Robert F. Kennedy Jr., America’s highest-ranking public-health official, and he may chalk it up to their terrain.
For centuries, doctors and scientists have agreed that germs are the underlying cause of infectious diseases. Someone coughs on you, you get a cold. Drink raw milk, and you might end up with E. coli or listeria. This widely accepted truth is the basis of pasteurization, vaccines and antibiotics.
But Kennedy has long embraced ideas rooted in theories that run counter to germ theory and help explain his deep mistrust of vaccines and his efforts to remake the U.S. public-health system. Those efforts came to a head last week as the Trump administration fired the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other top officials quit their jobs in the midst of disagreements with Kennedy vaccine policy. On Thursday, Kennedy testified before a heated Senate panel about the administration’s health agenda and the recent staffing shake-ups.
“Secretary Kennedy is committed to building the healthiest generation in American history,” said Andrew G. Nixon, director of communications at the Department of Health and Human Services in a statement. “He is working to end the chronic disease epidemic and restoring trust in public health through transparency, gold-standard science, and evidence-based medicine.”
As chemist Louis Pasteur’s germ theory of disease was gaining traction in the 1800s, his rival Antoine Béchamp raised an alternative explanation: Disease, he said, was caused by the state of the body, which he referred to as the “terrain.” In his view, a strong inner environment, bolstered by nutritional food and a healthy lifestyle, could fend off illness.
Most doctors and scientists rejected Béchamp’s view, and the science of germ theory, bolstered by a German doctor named Robert Koch who identified bacteria that caused specific diseases like anthrax and tuberculosis, became a foundational piece of modern public health. Today scientists recognize that even healthy people can get sick when a virus infects them. But Béchamp retained a fringe following, one that has spread in the internet era. Kennedy’s critiques of germ theory reflect the persistent support of that sentiment.
