NOTE:    I have included this subject in my website because the nature of the disease, aplastic anemia, often involves a low white blood count.  A low white blood count makes the patient very susceptable to infection.  Infection often is the cause of death in aplastic patients.  Remaining "germ free" becomes high priority among AA patients.  A good understanding of germs will make clear why we need a good diet.

Check this out.  Here is an online book on the Germ Theory, that is, the dispute between Bechamp and Pasteur.

Evidently, the issue of health and disease had been viewed quite differently before Pasteur popularized the germ theory as we know it today.  Nutrition has, for many centuries prior, been at the forefront for the prevention of diseases.  It was well documented that poor nutrition was the root to the vast majority of illnesses that were and are on the rise.  But why is that knowledge no longer at the forefront of today's disease cure and prevention?  Vilhjalmur Stefansson, in his book Cancer:  Disease of Civilization? explains that while the nineteenth century workers were engaged in comprehensive investigations for the cause of cancers and other diseases, Pasteur's work in 1873 became accepted that diseases are due to the invasion of the body by minute forms of animal or vegetable life;  and the other the discovery (by Moreau, 1891;  Loeb, 1900;  and Jensen, 1902) that cancer-cells can be successfully grafted from one animal to another of the same species.  The belief of the cause of disease had shifted from faulty nutrition to  forces such as bacteria, viruses, or germs.  (From the nutrition point of view, bacteria, viruses, or germs only damage an already weakened body due to malnutrition and faulty living.  Such germs feed and thrive on dead and dying tissue.  If the host was well nourished, the existing germs would not flourish and cause harm to the host.  Pasteur's theory completely disregarded the health of the host, but rather blamed the cause of the illness to the germ.  The individual would no longer have to be concerned with his nutrition for it was not the cause of his illness.) Stefansson quotes John Cope author of Cancer:  Civilization and Degeneration and writes:

"It would be difficult to exaggerate the expectations which were
aroused by the progress in scientific method implied by these two events.  (Illnesses being caused by germs and the ability to duplicate various illnesses in lab animals.)  Towards the end of the century the opposition with which Pasteur's work had at first been received gave place to a tendency to look for micro-organisms as the cause of every disease; and so it naturally came to pass that the methods of experimental laboratory research, which had proved so successful with cholera and tuberculosis, were made use of to throw light on the nature and origin of cancer.

"Nothing, therefore could have been more opportune than the discovery that cancers can be grown artificially in lower animals, for it seemed enormously to facilitate the investigation of this disease.  Instead of being hampered by dependence upon human beings for the material to be studied, or upon rare cancers in lower animals, the researcher could pursue his investigation unchecked.  Whole villages of mice could be collected and observed within the compass of a workshop or laboratory;  and, instead of having to wait some forty or fifty years before the growth of the cancer begins, as is generally the case with human beings, the disease could be produced artificially within a few weeks. . .

Working with rats was much easier than working with humans and a lot of optimism arose regarding cancer research.  Cope wrote in 1932 that more than thirty years had gone by since Pasteur's germ theory was made, laboratories had been built in all parts of the civilized world;  many thousands of pounds had been spent;  the lives of many able scientists have been devoted to the quest, and whole libraries of magazine articles and books testify to the patience, industry and ability with which its pursuit has been conducted.  And now after all these years of toil, not even the most sanguine researcher can point to anything that can by any stretch of the imagination be termed a solution of the problem which the researchers set out so confidently to answer.  According to Cope, cancer research had been on the wrong track ever since it became overconverted to Pasteur.  And, being on the wrong track, it got still further off course later through also becoming overconverted to the discoveries which we connect with the also truly great names of Moreau, Loeb, and Jensen.

"Experimental cancer research has, in short, become so isolated and so entrenched that, without being aware of it, the researcher now almost instinctively regards those who criticize his opinion, question his authority, or adopt other methods of working, not as fellow workers, but as amateurs, as "outsiders," or even as positive enemies. . .
 

More  coming soon. . .