Polio Special Part 1: A shot in the dark

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Polio Special Part 1: A shot in the dark

 

 

Date Published: 01/05/2004

Author: Janine Roberts

 

Polio is a devastating disease; the preferred method for fighting it is

vaccination. Yet there is a mass of historic evidence that suggests it is not

caused by a virus but by industrial and agricultural pollution.

During the first half of the 20th century infantile paralysis surged like a bush

fire, moving from place to place, afflicting large numbers of children, but only

in the industrialised West. Prior to these outbreaks it affected very few and

was often called `palsy'. In the 19th century scientists gave it the name

`poliomyelitis', referring to the inflammation of the grey nerves of the spinal

column in cases of paralysis. Poisonous metals were suspected of causing this

disease, particularly lead, arsenic and mercury. In 1824 the English scientist

John Cooke stated: `The fumes of these metals, or the receptance of them in

solution into the stomach, often cause paralysis.' (2)

 

In 1878 the link between palsy and toxins was strengthened when Alfred Vulpian

found that dogs dosed with lead suffered the same damage in their motor-neurone

cells as found in the human victims of infantile paralysis.(3) The Russian Popow

discovered in 1883 that the same damage could be done with arsenic.(4) This

should have sent shockwaves through the medical establishment as the

arsenic-based pesticide Paris Green had been widely used since 1870 to stop

Codling moth caterpillars ruining apple crops. But strangely it didn't.

 

In 1892 Paris Green was replaced in Massachusetts by the more toxic pesticide

lead arsenate. Two years later the first recorded epidemic of infantile

paralysis struck in Massachusetts' neighbouring state of Vermont. The outbreak

was investigated by Dr Charles Caverly, who reported that it was probably caused

by a toxin rather than a micro-organism. Caverly said: `It usually occurred in

families of more than one child, and as no efforts were made at isolation it was

very certain it was non-contagious.' (5)

 

Lead arsenate rapidly became the principal pesticide used on fruit and berries

throughout the industrial world. In 1907 calcium arsenate was introduced for use

primarily on cotton crops and in cotton mills. A year later 69 healthy children

suddenly fell paralytically ill in Massachusetts. They lived in a town with

three cotton mills, and in settlements downstream from those mills. Nearby there

were also orchards on which lead arsenates were almost certainly in use. They

were also living only a short distance downstream from the location of the

Vermont outbreak.

 

A further epidemic in Massachusetts in 1908 caused enormous public concern, but,

despite the evidence that exposure to toxins might have been responsible, the

investigating health officials overlooked the newly introduced pesticides; they

thought them essential to their war against viruses and bacteria - and to the

financial health of the agricultural industry. Thus, the children paralysed in

Massachusetts were not treated with toxin antidotes to see if these would

benefit them. Instead, parents were advised to keep their children clean while

the scientists, distracted by the then brand new theory that all epidemics had

to be caused by infectious germs, looked for the virus `responsible'.

 

 

In 1908 two scientists working in Austria, Karl Landsteiner and Erwin Popper,

reported that they might have found an `invisible virus' that had caused these

epidemics. They had made their discovery, they claimed, after making a

suspension in water of minced diseased spinal cord from a nine-year-old victim

of infantile paralysis. They had tested this noxious suspension by injecting one

or two cups of it directly into the brains of two monkeys. The monkeys fell

severely ill (as might have been predicted). One died and the other had its legs

paralysed. The scientists then dissected the monkeys and found damage in their

central nervous tissues similar to that found in human cases of infantile

paralysis.(8)

 

Today the World Health Organisation (WHO) still credits Landsteiner and Popper

as having found the poliovirus with this experiment. Why it does so is

inexplicable. The fluid they injected must have contained much human cellular

debris, any toxins involved in the child's illness, and probably several kinds

of viruses. So, it was no wonder the monkeys fell so desperately ill. Such a

soup could in no way be considered an `isolate' of the tiny organism we now call

a virus. It was also strangely non-infectious for a so-called virus, for the

monkeys were not paralysed when made to drink it or when one of their limbs was

injected with it, nor did they pass it on to other monkeys. The experiment, in

fact, shed no light on what had paralysed the monkeys, and for that matter, the

children.

 

Nevertheless, the following year Simon Flexner and Paul Lewis of the illustrious

Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in the US `proved' a similarly made

noxious soup was `infectious' by injecting it into the brain of one monkey. They

then extracted some fluid from its brain, injected this into another monkey, and

so on through a series of monkeys, paralysing all of them in the process.

Flexner and Lewis reported: `We failed utterly to discover bacteria... that

could account for the disease [paralysis]... The infecting agent of epidemic

poliomyelitis [probably] belongs to the class of the minute and filterable

viruses that have not thus far been demonstrated with certainty under the

microscope.'(9) In other words, we've injected a cocktail of viruses, cellular

debris and DNA into a series of monkeys, and we believe that a virus, not yet

identified within this noxious cocktail, is responsible! The procedure of

Flexner and Lewis was just as dubious as their conclusion: they took

no account of the contaminants in their mashed-up soup; they presumed what

happened in monkeys would be replicated in humans; and surprisingly, given the

evidence around at the time, they didn't inject samples of cyanide or lead into

the brains of monkeys to see if they also caused paralysis. In 1910

neonatologist L Emmett Holt reported: `Even five years ago if anyone had

suggested that the disease under discussion was an infectious or contagious one,

it would have been looked upon as a joke.' (10)

 

Nevertheless, this crude science inspired a 40-year hunt for the infantile

paralysis virus. All kinds of biological materials - spinal cord, brain, faecal

matter, even flies - were ground up and injected into monkeys' brains to try to

induce paralysis.(11)

 

 

Meanwhile, US president Franklin D Roosevelt, himself a victim of infantile

paralysis, set up in 1938 the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis

(NFIP). The NFIP promptly decided that there was no cure for those already

suffering from the disease. It would also refuse to examine reports of

successful treatment involving antidotes against toxins. It instead focused on

raising money for vaccine research by releasing stories about the horrors of

infantile paralysis. The worst cases were indeed frightening: some victims had

to be placed in `iron lungs' to help them breathe.

 

This advertising drive was sensationally successful, effective both in raising

money and in spreading fear of the poliovirus, especially among parents. But the

authorities had little immediate help for them. They simply advised them to keep

their children clean, away from places where infections could be passed on, such

as public swimming pools, and to kill flies. The zeal of the parents was

encouraged by advertisements showing giant flies attacking children. While the

poorer families responded by swatting flies and using more soap and water, the

more affluent tried to turn their homes into sterile zones by constantly

spraying them with insecticides. But these sprays proved useless. And what was

even more perculiar was that doctors reported the disease was affecting mostly

the children from better-off families - especially those who ate the most fresh

fruit. People thus started to call the disease `the middle-class plague'. All

this was so utterly inexplicable that parents were left

feeling helpless and despairing.

 

 

By the end of the 1930s the vaccine scientists had tested various `viral

isolates' from infected monkey brains, but when these isolates were fed orally

to monkeys the animals did not fall ill. This was most puzzling. The monkeys

produced antibodies afterwards, so some virus must have harmlessly infected

them. The only way the scientists found they could create a version of infantile

paralysis in the monkeys was by injecting large quantities of the `virus'

suspensions directly into their brains.

 

In 1941 the work of the virus hunters received a potentially fatal setback. Dr

John Toomey reported in The Journal of Pediatrics that it was not passed between

individuals `no matter how intimately exposed.' (12) If the disease was

non-infective, then it could not be caused by a virus and thus a vaccine would

not work.

 

Other holes started to appear in the virus theory. During WWII army doctors

found widespread immunity to the suspected poliovirus, and no evidence of

infantile paralysis epidemics, in the Middle East, Asia and Africa. In Turkey

they found people who called infantile paralysis `the American disease'. The

doctors were surprised: immunity to the virus presumably meant that it had

infected the population. So, how come it caused no epidemics in these countries?

 

However, the scientists racing to find a vaccine were so convinced that a virus

was to blame that they effectively disregarded any evidence to the contrary.

Among these it seems was Jonas Salk. In 1947 he found among the debris and

toxins of `viral isolates' from monkey brain experiments what he believed to be

the poliovirus. Although he had not proved that this could cause polio in

humans, he hoped he could use it to make a vaccine. But the highly respected

bacteriologist Claus Jungeblut thought otherwise. He observed that such `viral

isolates' did not create in monkeys the same disease as found in human cases of

infantile paralysis.(13) He concluded: `The highly specialised ... virus which

has been maintained in the past by intra-cerebral passage in rhesus monkeys is

more likely a laboratory artefact than the agent which causes the natural

disease in man'. In other words, the `virus' found by the vaccine scientists

probably did not exist in the wild but was a product of their

experiments.(14) If he were right, the consequences were vast. It could mean

that the `isolates' used by Salk to make a vaccine injected into over a hundred

million people, had no relationship to the human disease it was supposed to

counter.

 

Then, in 1948 Gilbert Dalldorf and Grace Sickles of the New York Department of

Health triumphantly claimed that they had found the virus in the excrement of

paralysed children. They had spun a sample to remove larger particles, diluted

it and injected it into the brains of mice. The animals unsurprisingly became

dangerously ill and paralysed.(15)

 

The news of Dalldorf and Sickles' experiment was nevertheless welcomed by the

vaccine scientists. Up to now they had struggled to find the poliovirus in human

spinal tissue. It would now be vastly easier to collect the poliovirus they

believed they had identified from human excrement than from human spinal tissue.

But why was it so hard to find it in the nerve cells in the spinal column that

it supposedly damaged - that is where it had to be, if it really were the cause

of infantile paralysis?

 

In 1951 they discovered a reason why. Quite simply, it was not always there.

Instead a different virus might be present eg the Coxsackie virus. This news was

grimly received. Their planned polio vaccine would not work against the

Coxsackie. There was `some feeling of dismay ... [this] added one more problem

to the nebulous conditions surrounding poliomyelitis... the more we learn about

poliomyelitis, the less we know,' wrote AL Hoynel in the journal The Medical

Clinics of North America. A Lancet editorial in the same year said this

discovery brought `a crop of new snags' to developing a vaccine.

 

Soon they discovered that it was possible for many different viruses to be

present in these damaged nerve cells. If toxins caused the disease, this would

be easy to explain. Many kinds of viruses are attracted to toxin-damaged cells.

More bad news for the polio vaccine scientists. The public expected them to

deliver vaccines that would stop the epidemics, but it was now evident that

their polio vaccines would, at the very best, only prevent some cases, the ones

with their poliovirus present.

 

And yet despite all the doubts and contrary findings, the vaccine research

continued. In 1949 John Enders and Thomas Weller discovered how to grow the

poliovirus in cell cultures, rather than only in the brains of living

animals.(16) This made possible the commercial production of virus-based

vaccines. Then it was discovered how to grow their poliovirus on cheap monkey

kidney and testicle cells.(17) Monkeys soon became the `growing bed' for the

virus. They would be trapped, imported and slaughtered by the hundreds of

thousands to make the polio vaccines, and are still caught in the wild today for

the purpose of testing the UK vaccine.

 

 

By 1954 Salk had his polio vaccine ready for testing. (He confessed to

`sacrificing' some 17,000 monkeys in the process of developing it) He based the

vaccine on his theory that children would gain immunity to living poliovirus if

dead poliovirus were injected into them. He hoped our sensitive immune system

would react by creating antibodies to these viral corpses that would also

protect us against living wild poliovirus. To kill the virus he poisoned it with

formaldehyde before putting it into his vaccine.

 

In 1954 he tested this concoction on more than 400,000 US children. It was

reported afterwards that `only' 112 of the children who received three jabs of

his vaccine contracted polio within the next few months. Salk judged his

experiment a success.(18) But his safety-test results omitted all cases of

children who were paralysed after one or two doses of the vaccine - or within

two weeks of taking the third dose. These were counted as cases of polio in the

non-vaccinated control groupand thus in my view cast doubt on the validity of

his results, for it made it impossible to tell just what impact his vaccine had

had. It could have been that many of the cases of polio in the control group

were caused by one dose of his vaccine - there was nothing in the published

accounts I have seen to say that this was not so.

 

Salk claimed that his vaccine protected `30 to 90 per cent' of those who

received it (a remarkably vague statistic). But more than 60 per cent could have

been immune already, at least according to the theory of the US federal agency

the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that working-class children

were already immune as a result of exposure to the virus in dirt. It is not

known if Salk ever checked to see if children were already immune before he

vaccinated them, but Hilary Koprowski reported in 1957 that the inhabitants of

the Congo were 85 per cent immune before they ever saw a dose of polio vaccine.

(Amazingly this didn't stop Koprowski. He went on to uselessly administer to

them hundreds of thousands of doses of his experimental vaccine.)

 

The Salk vaccine could have been derailed if a 1954 report by Dr Bernice Eddy,

the scientist in charge of the US government safety-testing lab, had been taken

seriously. Eddy stated that when she tested the Salk vaccine it caused severe

paralysis in monkeys. She photographed the diseased monkeys, took these photos

to her boss - and was reprimanded as an alarmist. She was not sure what it was

in the vaccine that caused the paralysis: was it a virus, cellular debris or a

toxin? Something quite deadly was clearly present. (One year later, after her

warnings proved true, she was stopped from working on polio.)

 

On April 12 1955, Salk's polio vaccine was pronounced totally safe and effective

in providing complete protection against poliomyelitis (infantile paralysis),

when it was launched by the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis before

an invited audience of 500 doctors and 200 journalists. The launch ceremony was

relayed by closed-circuit television to some 54,000 doctors in cities throughout

the US and Canada. Salk was immediately awarded a Congressional Medal by US

president Dwight Eisenhower. Church bells were rung in celebration of Salk's

victory. In The Manchester Guardian, Alistair Cooke wrote: `Nothing short of the

overthrow of the Communist regime in the Soviet Union could bring such rejoicing

to the hearts and homes in America as the historic announcement last Tuesday

that the 166-year war against poliomyelitis is almost certainly at an end.'

 

 

Medical Fraud

The triumph following the launch of the Salk vaccine was short-lived. The

medical historian Dr M Beddow Baily recorded what happened next: `Only 13 days

after the vaccine had been acclaimed by the whole of the US press and radio as

one of the greatest medical discoveries of the century, and two days after the

British ministry of health had announced it would go right ahead with the

manufacture of the vaccine, came the first news of disaster. Children inoculated

with one brand of the vaccine had developed poliomyelitis. In the following days

more and more cases were reported, some of them after inoculation with other

brands.' (19)

 

Within two weeks of the launch the number of cases of polio in vaccinated

children had nearly reached 200. This created near panic in the White House.

President Eisenhower had publicly endorsed the vaccine at its launch, so he sent

the US health secretary Oveta Hobby to make it very plain to the Surgeon General

that the president needed to be spared the embarrassment of further such cases.

On 8 May 1955 the Surgeon General suspended the entire US production of the

vaccine. After hurried meetings between Salk, manufacturers and the surgeon

general, distribution of the vaccine was resumed five days later, with new

regulations in place to ensure better standards in the vaccine laboratories. The

general consensus was that these cases had been caused by viruses in the vaccine

that had survived the formaldehyde, despite evidence that repeated injections

can cause paralysis.

 

However, despite these new regulations, four months later more than 2,000 cases

of infantile paralysis were recorded in Boston, despite the vaccination of

130,000 children in the city. The previous year it had seen only 273 cases. The

number of cases doubled in vaccinated New York State and Connecticut, and

tripled in Vermont. They increased by five times in both Rhode Island and

Wisconsin. Many were paralysed in the injected arm.

 

It seemed that the vaccine would soon be totally discredited. So, to protect the

President, Salk, the vaccine manufacturers and themselves from the humiliation

of an unmitigated failure, the US health authorities had to dramatically slash

the incidence of poliomyelitis. They managed this by simply changing the way

they recorded the incidents of poliomyelitis. It worked like this:

 

Prior to 1956, the authorities recorded a patient as having paralytic polio

(infantile paralysis) if they suffered from paralytic symptoms for 24 hours.

After 1956 patients had to have these paralytic symptoms for at least 60 days to

be counted as having polio. As many people recovered within 60 days, this

measure alone dramatically cut the official number of cases. This `drop' in

polio cases was publicly credited to the vaccine. Furthermore, all cases of

polio occurring within 30 days of vaccination (such as the first 200 cases that

had so alarmed the White House) were in future not to be blamed on the vaccine

but to be recorded as `pre-existing'.

 

But Salk continued to worry. Despite its regulatory and statistical `success',

the reputation of his vaccine was plummeting. In June 1955 the British doctors'

union the Medical Practitioners' Union wrote: `These misfortunes would be almost

endurable if a whole new generation were to be rendered permanently immune to

the disease. In fact, there is no evidence that any lasting immunity is

achieved.' (21)

 

The following month Canada suspended its distribution of Salk's vaccine. By

November all European countries had suspended distribution plans, apart from

Denmark. By January 1957 17 US states had stopped distributing the vaccine. The

same year The New York Times reported that nearly 50 per cent of cases of

infantile paralysis in children between the ages of five and 14 had occurred

after vaccination.

 

So, more regulatory and statistical changes were needed in order to give the

polio vaccine the appearance of a triumph of modern medicine. What better way to

achieve this than to reclassify all the cases of polio into numerous other

diseases resulting in a massive reduction in polio cases, and a host of other

diseases to attract funding. And this is exactly what they did. Prior to 1958

the definition of infantile paralysis (polio) included cases in which paralysis

was minimal: perhaps manifesting itself as a very stiff neck, often accompanied

by widespread pain. Polio also included cases of `meningitis', or of

inflammation of the membrane that protects the brain and spinal neurons. The CDC

describes such cases as `serious but rarely fatal'.(22) Prior to 1958 these

cases were scientifically referred to as `non-paralytic poliomyelitis', or polio

for short. Henceforward, they would be reclassified. The Los Angeles County

health authorities stated: `Most cases reported prior to July 1

1958 of non-paralytic poliomyelitis are now reported as viral or aseptic

meningitis.' The incidence of meningitis soared as official polio cases

declined, as the following table (compiled from national surveillance

reports)shows.

 

Non-paralytic polio cases.

1951-1960 70,083

1961-1982 589

1983-1992 0

 

Aseptic meningitis cases.

1951-1960 0

1961-1982 102,999

1983-1992 117,366

 

Jim West, Images of Poliomyelitis

 

These classifications are still used today. Last year the US National Center for

Infectious Diseases reported no cases of poliomyelitis but 30,000 to 50,000

cases of aseptic meningitis requiring hospitalisation. There are probably

several times this number of incidents of aseptic meningitis that did not

require hospitalisation, but statistics are no longer kept for such cases.

 

Then another scam was enacted to massage down the poliomyelitis figures. It took

advantage of the 1951 discovery that different viruses could be present in cases

of infantile paralysis. Prior to 1958 this did not matter. A doctor diagnosed a

person with polio by taking note of their evident symptoms. They did not

investigate to see if the poliovirus were present. In 1958 a new regulation was

put in place requiring doctors to only register a patient as having polio if the

poliovirus were present, something that was very difficult to establish for

sure. For a start, it was impossible to tell by looking at symptoms. The

Textbook of Child Neurology reported: `Coxsackie virus and echoviruses can cause

paralytic syndromes that are clinically indistinguishable from paralytic

poliomyelitis.' This new requirement for doctors caused a vast drop in the

number of cases registered as poliomyelitis - a drop that ever since has been

credited solely to the vaccine.

 

So, when patients diagnosed as having polio in a 1958 epidemic in Detroit were

re-tested as required by this new rule, 49 per cent were found to have no

poliovirus. They had to be reclassified as having `non-poliomyelitis acute

flaccid paralysis' even though they were suffering from symptoms identical to

poliomyelitis with the same paralysis and the same pain. Other polio cases were

reclassified as `Guillian-Barré syndrome', which some researchers now think is

what crippled Roosevelt. Yet more cases are now referred to as `Hand, Foot and

Mouth Disease', which can also cause paralysis. And last year the Coxsackie

virus was found in cases of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS), which sometimes

shows polio-like symptoms of muscle damage; in the past CFS might have been

classified as a form of polio.

 

If this process of reclassification had not occurred, it would have been

impossible to hide the fact that infantile paralysis cases had sharply increased

after the introduction of Salk's vaccine. Without the Coxsackie and aseptic

meningitis reclassifications, for example, the number of reported cases of

paralytic polio would have doubled from 2,500 in 1957 to 5,000 in 1959. (23)

This deliberate fraud did not go entirely unnoticed, however. Dr Bernard

Greenberg, the then head of the Department of Biostatistics at the University of

North Carolina, testified at a 1962 Congressional hearing that infantile

paralysis cases had increased after the introduction of the vaccine by 50 per

cent from 1957 to 1958, and by 80 per cent from 1958 to 1959. He concluded that

US health officials had manipulated the statistics to give entirely the opposite

impression. (24)

 

 

 

Additional Information

 

 

 

Milk paralysis

 

Many infantile paralysis outbreaks between 1905 and the 1940s would be linked by

doctors to supplies of contaminated milk, including one in 1927 in Broadstairs

in Kent. The Broadstairs outbreak was fairly typical. It affected institutions

such as boarding schools that had little contact with each other, but which took

milk from a common source.(6) These epidemics ended when suspected milk supplies

were stopped. Lead arsenate was being used as a cattle dip, but the formaldehyde

that used to be added to milk to prolong its `shelf life' may also have been

responsible. (In 1897 The Australian Medical Gazette reported that formaldehyde

in milk had caused several cases of paralysis.) (7)

 

 

 

Especially those who ate the most fresh fruit

 

The use of lead arsenate to spray orchards was widespread in 1930s America.

Orchards were sprayed 10 or more times a year. Spraying occurred in summer, the

season when children went down with infantile paralysis. Many researchers

associated outbreaks of the condition with fruit supplies. The UK threatened to

stop imports of US apples unless the pesticide level was cut. Tobacco and other

crops were also sprayed. Today the soil in heavily sprayed areas remains so

polluted that it is a major problem to housing developers: in many places the

soil has to be completely removed.

 

 

 

Vaccine Paralysis

 

1 Muscles can be poisoned and paralysed by being repeatedly injected with

vaccines or antibiotics; this is now called `provocation paralysis', and was no

secret in the 1950s. In 1952 vaccinations had been suspended for the summer in

the UK and US (the `infantile paralysis season') as the injected arms of many

children had been paralysed. The Lancet had reported: `Clinically, the cases

associated with recent immunisations were indistinguishable from the acute cases

of paralytic poliomyelitis.' (20) By 1955 US children were receiving three

injections with Salk's polio vaccine, as well as the smallpox and whooping cough

vaccines.

 

2 .Also, the Salk vaccine was far from pure. We now know that it was

contaminated with a small amount of formaldehyde and viral debris.

 

 

 

What are viruses?

 

The pharmaceutical industry makes vast profits by exploiting paranoia about

viruses, so it is important to understand just what viruses are. When viruses

were first discovered they were presumed to be enemies. (The word `virus' is

Latin for `poisonous fluid'.) This was a serious misconception.

 

We now know that human bodies need and create viruses. Our cells contain tiny

molecular engineers, known as transposons, which cut and adapt our DNA.

Sometimes we may need to send genetic code from one cell to another - perhaps so

as to resolve genetic problems or to deal with toxins. Cells can do this by

turning transposons into messengers that carry genetic code from cell to cell.

Travelling transposons are called `endogenous' viruses: we manufacture them

ourselves. They are essential to our genetic information highway. We make

millions of such viruses.

 

Other viruses are `exogenous': they originate from outside the human body. They

must enter (infect) cells in order to `reproduce'. Some kill the cells they use

to do this - others do not. If they are viruses that we have never met before,

then they are more likely to be dangerous to us. Such a virus has recently been

found present in 85 per cent of all cases of a cancer, mesothelioma, which is

caused by asbestos. This virus, SV40, seemingly makes this toxin more dangerous

to us, by switching off a human gene, p53, which protects us against cancer. And

yet many exogenous viruses also do us no harm. We sometimes welcome them by

making their genetic code part of our DNA. As such these harmless viruses are

likely to have been around humanity for a long time. We have become adapted to

each other.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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