Daniel took a small sip of the peppery and slightly sweet tea, then glanced up. He noticed three natives surrounding him who weren’t drinking tea.

It took Daniel a moment to make the correlation.

Two of the three villagers not drinking tea were among the nine who had positive ANA tests. One was a Machinere Indian, and Daniel asked in Spanish why he wasn’t drinking the tea. He said he didn’t like the taste, and he never drank it. This was the same for the other villager as well.

Daniel quickly jumped up and ran through the village, tracking down the other seven with positive ANA tests. It turned out that all nine villagers with positive ANA tests rarely, if ever, drank the ginger tea.

Daniel was onto something.

Early on, he’d discounted the tea as a vector because the water was boiled in a copper kettle for long periods over a fire, and 99 percent of microorganisms exposed to water above 149 degrees for five minutes will die.

But there were species of bacteria that had extreme tolerances to heat. In fact, some were present in several probiotic teas your average person could buy at the grocery store. Most used a strain of bacteria called Bacillus coagulans. It had a high tolerance to heat as well as to high pH levels. It could survive both boiling water and stomach acid.

In hindsight, he should have known. When Daniel talked with the shaman about any herbal remedies he may have given him when he was unconscious, the shaman mentioned the tea. They’d let it cool, then poured it down his throat.

The tea was thought to have magic healing properties.

But it might not be magic.

It might be scientific.

≈

Daniel convinced four of the nine villagers who had positive ANA tests to drink the tea for two weeks, then he tested their blood a second time for autoantibodies.

All four tested negative.

The tea was the vector.

≈

There are over 1,300 different species of ginger and the root of the herbaceous perennial flower had long been known to have therapeutic and anti-inflammatory properties. Daniel couldn’t rule out that it was the ginger itself that was suppressing the villager’s autoimmune response. Still, he believed it was something microbial. Something living in the surrounding soil and growing on the ginger root.

Under the compact microscope that Daniel had with him, he viewed a droplet of tea on a slide. There was a solitary bacteria that had survived the boiling heat.

In a Petri dish, Daniel was able to culture the bacteria.

He then convinced four of the remaining five villagers with positive ANA tests to ingest small amounts of the bacteria for two weeks.

He retested their blood. All four had negative ANA tests. The test for the control, the one villager who didn’t ingest the bacteria, remained positive.

It wasn’t the ginger.

It was the bacteria.