“…Some of Paul W. Ewald’s best thinking started with an attack of
diarrhea on a field trip to Kansas.” Biologist says germs, not genes, to blame for most human ailments. The time may be ripe for a renascence of infectious disease approaches to many ‘unsolved’ illnesses, after several decades in which the field has been eclipsed by advances in other specialties in medicine. Cervical cancer, Burkitt’s lymphoma and peptic ulcer disease have all been accepted as having associations with infectious agents, and Ewald says in his new book, Plague Time: How Stealth Infections Cause Cancers, Heart Disease, and Other Deadly Ailments (2000) that the ‘best’ is yet to come. In my own field, I’ve recently cited E. Fulller Torrey’s speculation on the infectious etiology of schizophrenia. Nando Times