Can microbes cause hereditary diseases?
One example is the presence of chlamydial pneumonia, which is a small, intracellular bacteria that causes upper respiratory tract infections. They’ve now found this organism in the plaques of the arteries. And so they’re looking at the cause and effect of chlamydial infections leading to arteriosclerosis. In the past, one thought that cardiovascular disease of that nature was not necessarily heritable, but it did run in families. Now they’ve shown that in this case, that there is one organism that they have seen a direct correlation with the presence of this organism and the causation of disease early in life, with later development of arteriosclerosis. So I believe that the more we look in to this phenomena, the more we’re going to find out that there are more diseases that are direct results of bacterial infection and microbial infection than we currently know about or currently believe to be so. What are human pathogens? Some viruses infect plants, others infect insect cells, and so
