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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2018 Jan 1.
Published in final edited form as: Antiviral Res. 2016 Nov 8;137:1–5. doi: 10.1016/j.antiviral.2016.11.002

Table 1.

Koch’s postulates to identify the causative agent of an infectious disease.

  • The microorganism must be found in abundance in all organisms suffering from the disease, but should not be found in healthy organisms*

  • The microorganism must be isolated from a diseased organism and grown in pure culture

  • The microorganism (from the pure culture) should cause disease when inoculated into a healthy organism

  • The microorganism must be re-isolated from the inoculated, diseased experimental host and identified as being identical to the original specific causative agent

*

Koch dismissed the universal requirement of the first postulate following the discovery of asymptomatic carriers of diseases such as cholera.