KOCH POSTULATES

5 KOCH POSTULATES
(1) The microorganism must be found in diseased but not healthy individuals;
(2) The microorganism must be cultured from the diseased individual;
(3) Inoculation of a healthy individual with the cultured microorganism must recapitulated the disease; and finally
(4) The microorganism must be re-isolated from the inoculated, diseased individual and matched to the original
microorganism.
(5) The suspected pathogen should be found in all instances of the disease in question, and its distribution in the host
should correspond with the distribution of observed lesions.

EXCEPTIONS TO KOCH POSTULATES

- Koch abandoned the requirement of the first postulate altogether when he discovered asymptomatic carriers of
cholera.
- The second postulate may also be suspended for certain microorganisms or entities that cannot (at the present
time) be grown in pure culture, such as prions responsible for Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease and viruses. Viruses cannot
be grown in culture.
- The third postulate specifies “should”, not “must”, because as Koch himself proved in regard to both tuberculosis
and cholera, not all organisms exposed to an infectious agent will acquire the infection.