Koch's Cure for Consumption

The Cause and Cure of Consumption

the mici'ozyma that evolves the germ, and the germ that builds the cell. If, then, the tubercle bacillus is helping all the time to rid the bod}7 of solid waste matter which cannot be eliminated by any of the usual excreting channels, surely it must be a futile procedure to introduce serums and vaccines into the blood for the purpose of killing off this beneficent germ." These quotations will, ...

Identification of Unknown Turfgrass Pathogens: Kochs Postulates

History In 1876, a country doctor in Germany by the name of Robert Koch developed the first conclusive empirical evidence that a particular microbe causes a particular disease. Although he was working on anthrax, a deadly disease of warm-blooded animals (caused by the bacterium Bacillus anthracis), the procedures he laid out for determining the pathogenicity of a microorganism (in other words, ...

Cure for Stammering

Breakthrough cure (for mice)

Many a science writer has fantasized about capping a story with the headline “Good News for Sick Mice!” One of the toughest struggles is deciding how to cover a story that has produced tantalizing, even amazing, results in laboratory animals but could well be a total bust by the time it gets to humans. That issue came up in early July, when Elan Pharmaceuticals, an Irish company with laboratori...

Randomisation: magical cure for bias?

Introduction There is general consensus that randomised clinical trial (RCT) can provide the most valid conclusions about effects of different treatment as eligible patients are randomly allocated into two or more alternative treatments. Trials using non-randomised comparison groups like historical controls tend to yield more optimistic results than randomised trials. It is believed that random...