For the last century, the medical community has largely assumed that the bacteria that inhabit our bodies and natural surroundings have been accurately characterized and documented.

Yet according to Penn State researcher Jennifer Loveland-Curtze, “Microbes comprise up to one-third or more of the Earth’s biomass, yet fewer than 8,000 microbes have been described out of the approximately 3,000,000 that are presumed to exist,”

The statistic may be mind-boggling to some, yet, in reality, should come as no surprise. Considering the fact that bacteria are notoriously adept at evolving crafty survival mechanisms and have had eons in which to do so, the amount of research over the previous decades aimed at characterizing new bacteria and their survival adaptations has actually been minimal.

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Could people 800 years ago have benefited from the Marshall Protocol? Did cave men suffer from infection with L-form bacteria? Nobody knows for sure when these stealthy pleiomorphic bacteria first began to infect human beings, but a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by researchers at Pennsylvania State University suggests that Th1 disease was already common during the middle ages.

The team analyzed 490 skeletons from a London cemetery for Black Death victims – the name given to those people who succumed to the plague epidemic of 1347 to 1351. Black Death – named after the black spots the bubonic form of the plague caused on the skin - was one of the deadliest recorded in human history, killing about 75 million people, according to some estimates, including more than a third of Europe’s population.

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A wide body of research has shown that classical forms of bacteria often transform into tiny variants of the same species, losing their cell walls in the process. They are then referred to as L-form or cell wall deficient (CWD) bacteria. Although researchers have known about L-form bacteria for over a century, up until recently they have not fully understood their connection to chronic disease. It is now known that these bacteria are responsible for causing a wide array of chronic diseases including rheumatoid arthritis, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Lyme disease, and sarcoidosis.

L-forms of various shapes and sizes inside the cells of a patient with breast cancer, photo taken by Alan Cantwell

Over the past century researchers have identified over 50 different species of bacteria capable of transforming into the L-form and it is likely that even more species will be discovered in the coming years. The vast majority of researchers and doctors are not aware that L-form bacteria are present in their patients because the pathogens will not grow under standard laboratory conditions and must be cultured in a different medium and at a different temperature than classical bacteria.

In 2005, a team of researchers at the Royal Brompton Hospital in London published a paper that reviewed the clinical significance of the L-form as an infectious agent. The review discussed the work of hundreds of researchers who have cultivated the L-form and implicated it in a wide array of diseases.

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