The big question therefore, is if 100% of the patients suffered from Candida, why wasn't the cause of Candida infections a target of research, rather than immune deficiency? Immune deficiency is commonplace with any disease, even the common cold. When someone gets the flu, or any other illness, it is generally and historically true that immune deficiency, or being "run down" from not enough rest, or not enough nutrition, is a key factor in allowing the pathogen to take hold. That is a given, and not exclusive to any one illness.

Uniquely, Candida infections occur due to ingestion of antibiotics that kill off healthy bacteria and skew the balance of good and bad "bugs" naturally occuring in the body. Untreated (with appropriate supplements of healthy bacteria like lactobacillus and bifida), Candida can kill its human host.

It is interesting to imagine what would have happened to a budding pharmaceutical industry had antibiotics been implicated in the onset of a syndrome later to become known as AIDS. Maybe today we wouldn't have the serious problems that threaten the species, homo sapiens, such as methicillin resisitant staph (MRSA), or vancomycin resistant streptococcus, or multi-drug resistant tuberculosis.

Western blot analysis courtesy http://bmc.ub.uni-potsdam.de/1471-2172-6-10/ Mayorov et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. © 2005 This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.