ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2023
From second thoughts on the germ theory to a full-blown host theory.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
What it found
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed.
- The ups and downs of human UNC93B1: Autoimmune and viral conditions.Journal of human immunity · 2027Article
- Beyond the germ: Rethinking implant-related infections as a host-microbiota-biomaterial ecosystem.Biofilm · 2026Review
- Toward a monogenic architecture of human infections: From 1996 to 2026.Journal of human immunity · 2026Review
- The immune system as a regulator of normal physiology.Frontiers in immunology · 2026Review
- Auto-Abs neutralizing type I IFNs in patients with severe Powassan, Usutu, or Ross River virus disease.The Journal of experimental medicine · 2024Article
- The Microbe, the Infection Enigma, and the Host.Annual review of microbiology · 2024Review
- Review
- The germ theory revisited: A noncentric view on infection outcome.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Human autoantibodies neutralizing type I IFNs: From 1981 to 2023.Immunological reviews · 2024Review
- The microbial damage and host response framework: lesson learned from pathogenic survival trajectories and immunoinflammatory responses ofFrontiers in immunology · 2024Review
- Longitudinal bacterial prevalence in cystic fibrosis airways: Fact and artifact.Journal of cystic fibrosis : official journal of the European Cystic Fibrosis Society · 2024Article
- Quantifying how much host, pathogen, and other factors affect human protective adaptive immune responses.Frontiers in immunology · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
Abstract
In 1955, René Dubos famously expressed his "second thoughts on the germ theory", attributing infectious diseases to various "changing circumstances" that weaken the host by unknown mechanisms. He rightly stressed that only a small minority of individuals infected by almost any microbe develop clinical disease. Intriguingly, though, he did not mention the abundant and elegant findings reported from 1905 onward that unambiguously pointed to host genetic determinants of infection outcome in plants and animals, including human inborn errors of immunity. Diverse findings over the next 50 y corroborated and extended these earlier genetic and immunological observations that René Dubos had neglected. Meanwhile, the sequential advent of immunosuppression- and HIV-driven immunodeficiencies unexpectedly provided a mechanistic basis for his own views. Collectively, these two lines of evidence support a host theory of infectious diseases, with inherited and acquired immunodeficiencies as the key determinants of severe infection outcome, relegating the germ to an environmental trigger that reveals an underlying and preexisting cause of disease and death.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.