Ben:
>I accept that many others have differing opinions, but I personally feel
>that the "germ" or "contagious" theory is just a scare tactic to push us
>into an endless cycle of vaccination, antibiotics, and other drugs that will
>never benefit our long-term health one bit.  Simply trying to kill
>everything in our food to avoid disease is much like shooting a crowing
>rooster to stop the sun from coming up.

Hi, Ben, and welcome to raw-food.

So the idea here is that some group of powerful people just really likes
"vaccination, antibiotics, and other drugs" and they are trying to scare us
by inventing the scare tactic of germ/contagion theory?  :/

While I ain't much of a conspiracy kinda guy, I do admit to noticing how
tidy it is that a slew of media attention to the evils of germs has
coincided with the inways that irradiation has made in the last months. No
doubt drug companies and the irradiation folks have a vested interest in
the paradigm of "scary germs", BUT the germ theory predates these
folks--they didn't invent it as a ruse to do devilish things to us
earthlings. They may well be exploiting folks fear of germs, but they
didn't sit around a table and invent it from scratch. ;)

As limited as the (narrow-minded) "germ theory of disease" is, I think
replacing it with the (narrow-minded) "germ theory of health" might be
un-useful. There are plenty of examples of serious rawists having trouble
with parasites, bacterial and viral infections which are not
self-terminating, which would probably have been life-threatening if
medications were not finally used. Many of these instances have been
discussed on this list (along with Price's and Schmid's work). Further,
wild animals have their share of trouble with disease--not to the degree
that domesticated animals to, of course, but it is not a non-issue for wild
animals.

Non-industrial and pre-ag peoples have lots of experience with parasites,
even among tribes which are as "pristine" as those studied by Price.
Indeed, one criticism I've heard of Price's work is that he ignored the
diseases which he encountered among the peoples on his travels because they
often weren't the "western diseases". Parasites are an issue for nearly
every culture that I have studied, whether SADers or wild chimp populations.

You would propbably be interested in searching the archives of this list to
find out the kinds of previous chatter which has been bandied about
regarding these issues.

Cheers,
Kirt