A 128-year-old lesson in virology

by Mees Baaijen, 1400 words, 5 minutes

VIRAL LOAD

Science is not a series of steps; it is a continuing process of creativity … properly nourished by each accomplishment, an accomplishment which itself moves the healthy mind onward and upward toward greater challenges than those he, or she has just conquered.

– Lyndon H. Larouche, Jr. (1922-2019), American political activist

To all No-Virus adherents: you are invited to debunk this story!!

Please, go ahead and debunk this story, or proof it never happened, or that it cannot have ever happened! Point at all its logical fallacies, or present credible arguments that radiation, stress, nutrition and toxins are the causal agents of the highly contagious animal disease I am going to analyze!

Because if you don’t refute it, this is the black swan that will definitively destroy your theory that all swans are white!

You may of course throw this whole story blindly and dogmatically out of the window, as your leaders have taught you, so you can maintain the untouchable illusion of a virus-free world. After the many comments received on my site, I am even sure that some of you can refute this story without even having read it!

How it started

In Germany, 128 years ago, investigations started into foot-and-mouth disease (FMD), a nasty, economically important, contagious disease infecting cattle, sheep and pigs that had been known for centuries in Europe and Asia.

At the time, the latest car models were the Daimler Phoenix and the Benz Velo, both roofless and with a top speed under 20 km per hour. Electricity and telephones were still extremely rare. But in 1876, Robert Koch (Germany) had proven that a bacterium, Bacillus anthracis, causes the disease anthrax. Soon the Pasteur Institute (in France) and the Robert Koch Institute (RKI: indeed, infamous since the Covid plandemic, and in fact earlier) were founded to pioneer the study of infectious diseases.

Two German veterinarians, Dr Loeffler and Dr Frosch (from the Institute für Infektionskrankheiten in Berlin, later called RKI), lead the first studies into FMD. Their final aim was to find methods to control this feared disease, such as disinfection techniques and immunization. On April 17, 1897, Loeffler and Frosch presented their first report. With considerable logistical difficulties, they had managed to collect infectious material at several FMD outbreaks. Their method was to extract lymph (a clear liquid) from still unruptured tongue vesicles (blisters), as to prevent bacterial or other contamination. Only one or two animals per herd could be used for this purpose.

Bacterial sterility was tested before the experimental inoculation of cattle or pigs (cell cultures were not yet available). In a later report it was confirmed that fresh and sterile lymph, diluted with water and filtered to eliminate bacteria, remained fully infectious. As for the conservation of the lymph, at temperatures of 37 °C (or higher), infectiousness was lost in 12 hours (or less), but under refrigeration the lymph stayed infectious for 14 days.

Early contagion experiments

In experimentally infected cattle (by intravenous injection), signs of fever and tongue lesions appeared after 1-3 days, depending on the quantity and virulence of the lymph. Foot lesions appeared 1-2 days later. Even very small amounts of lymph (up to 1/10.000,000 ml in later experiments) were still infectious.

Alternatives ways of infection were tried. Inoculation at scarifications in the upper and lower lip mucosa was effective and led to the same results. Infection via the digestive tract (via gelatine capsules placed in the esophagus) had the same result as the injections, and it was concluded that this was most probably a normal pathway in field outbreaks. Transmission of saliva from recently ill animals with a cloth was not always successful. Attempts to cultivate the agent in a lab medium (like the ones in use for bacteria) did not work.

Several trials to investigate claims by other scientists that certain bacteria or protozoa were responsible for FMD were all in vain. That the causal agent was not an (extremely potent) toxin was refuted as dilutions of the lymph caused a similar disease as undiluted lymph. Later, serial inoculations were used to prove that the virus replicated in the body of the host.

When the infectious lymph was passed through very fine filters (not passable for bacteria), the infectiousness and virulence of the filtrate were not affected. The hypothesis proposed by Martinus Beyerinck in 1898, that a virus is a liquid agent and not a particle, was abandoned when lymph which was put through a very fine Kitasato filter became inactive.

Repeated filtration tests showed that individual particles were consistently between 20 nanometer (nm) to 100 nm in size. Such particles cannot be detected with optical microscopes, as the maximum optical resolution is 200 nm. Electron microscopes had not been invented yet. As a current reference (ChatGPT):

Human/animal cell 10–100 micrometers (µm) ~ 1000× a virus

Bacterium         0.5–5 micrometers (µm)  ~ 10–50× a virus

Virus             20–300 nanometers (nm)    1 µm = 1000 nm

Thus, without much ado and in the absence of sophisticated methods or techniques, Loeffler and Frosch became the first people to discover and describe that a contagious animal disease, foot and mouth disease, was caused by very small particles that somehow replicated in the host where they caused the typical lesions of the disease, from where infectious material could naturally be spread to other animals, but also by artificial means. This is what we now call a virus.

Serial inoculation experiments

To become independent from fresh lymph harvested in outbreaks, with many complications and high cost, Loeffler and colleagues also searched for ways to maintain the virus in, or close to the lab. But when they carried out an experimental infection in a series of 6 calves (where filtered lymph from the first sick animal was passed to a second healthy animal, etc.) the virus lost virulence and failed to produce lesions in all animals (this phenomenon, called attenuation, would later be used in the development of vaccines for many other diseases).

In a serial trial where calves and pigs were used alternately, this problem was solved. The virulence of the pig/calf passaged virus was enhanced: higher than the original field virus. Series of calves could now be inoculated without any loss of virulence. Goats which used to be fully resistant to the milder virus could now easily be infected, and they even spread the disease to other goats in the same stable. Even dogs - which were considered insusceptible - who had visited a stable with sick animals got infected with the virulent strain of FMD virus.

Loeffler’s only goal was to find solutions for the control of FMD. But not so long thereafter, less responsible scientists would be contracted by totally ruthless members of the Global Mafia, like the Rockefellers, to create extremely dangerous virus strains by alternate passages or other tricks. See the books The Sleeper Agent by Adam Finnegan and Dissolving Illusions by dr. Suzanne Humpfries (who describes the deadly (25% of 23,000 cases) poliomyelitis outbreak in 1916 in New York, caused by a deliberately enhanced poliovirus from Rockefeller’s lab on Manhattan).

Present situation

An immense body of virologic and related knowledge has been built up in the 128 years since Loeffler’s crucial discovery of the FMD virus. Yet this economically important disease still occurs in Africa and Asia, with occasional outbreaks in Europe.

Of the probably millions of viruses that exist, only a few play a role in diseases: over 200 in humans, many thousands in animals, about a thousand in plants, but many more infect bacteria (bacteriophages).

Over the last century, the natural human viruses have become less virulent. Presently, some viruses still play a necessary, but not decisive role in certain diseases: indeed, lifestyle, nutrition, and avoidance of toxins (most vaccines included), radiation and stress are now the main factors to stay healthy.

But artificially enhanced or modified human and zoonotic viruses still represent a great danger!

Literature used

Several 1897/1898 reports of the RKI institute (in German, obtainable from the author)

Olitsky, P. K., Traum, J., Schoening, H. W. (1928). Report of the foot-and-mouth-disease commission of the United States department of agriculture. Washington, U.S. Government printing Office. 76: 1-172. https://ideas.repec.org/p/ags/uerstb/156555.html

The following article is a richly illustrated showcase of the state of the art in molecular virology:

Foot-and-mouth disease virus antigenic landscape and reduced immunogenicity elucidated in atomic detail. Nature Communications 15(1): 8774

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-53027-