Polio Special Part 3 : The hidden epidemic

[Guest guest]

http://www.theecologist.org/archive_article.html?article=458 & category=76

 

 

Polio Special Part 3 : The hidden epidemic

 

 

Date Published: 01/05/2004

Author: Janine Roberts

 

The World Health Organisation (WHO) confidently predicts that polio epidemics

are all but over and that the poliovirus itself will become extinct by the end

of 2004. Who is it trying to fool and why?

The hidden epidemic

 

The disease that struck down so many in the 20th century epidemics was then

known as infantile paralysis, or poliomyelitis. It was this disease the polio

vaccines were intended to eliminate. But today infantile paralysis is renamed as

Acute Flaccid Paralysis (AFP). How could the WHO be claiming to have nearly

eliminated this disease when, by its own figures, epidemics of AFP are not

ending but rapidly getting worse.

 

Take the WHO's figures for the east Asian/Pacific region as an example. They

reveal that the incidence of AFP went up between 1994 and 1998 by 50 per cent in

China, 400 per cent in Malaysia, and 1,500 per cent in the Pacific islands. But

other than providing these statistics, WHO pays little attention to any of these

cases in which the poliovirus is absent - meaning nearly all of them. These

cases are left without a cure -and even without a vaccine! They become

effectively a hidden epidemic.

 

WHO makes even bolder claims for Europe and the Americas. It states that they

are now free of both polio and AFP. On closer inspection, WHO's figures do not

bear much scrutiny. It declares that there is `no data' for the number of cases

of AFP in the UK and the US. It then interprets `no data' as if it means

`zero'.(41) But the US government's Centres for Disease Control (CDC) does not

agree The CDC records that many thousands of cases of AFP occur in the US every

year. It reports that AFP can have many causes. For example, it says that

Guillain-Barré disease causes 17 cases of AFP per 100,000 of the US population.

That translates into around 50,000 cases annually. The CDC also says that every

year there are some 30,000 to 50,000 cases of aseptic meningitis serious enough

to require hospitalisation. Both Guillain-Barré disease and aseptic meningitis

were diagnosed as polio during the US epidemics prior to 1957. If you use the

pre-1957 definition, then there are many more cases of

poliomyelitis occurring in the US today, than there were in 1952 - at the

height of the US polio epidemics.

 

To this tally of `Acute Flaccid Paralysis' one could add the many more cases of

AFP reported by the CDC as occurring in an epidemic that has swept across the US

over the past five years, and which is attributed to the `West Nile' virus

(WNV). The CDC states that WNV can cause a `polio-like' paralysis. Many

scientists have been less ambiguous. They say WNV is clinically

indistinguishable from poliomyelitis.(42) A paper recently published by the

British Medical Journal suggests WNV may be `rapidly evolving to fill new

ecological niches'.(43) In 2003 there were 9,389 cases of this disease in the

US, of which 2,773 showed damage to the nervous system and 246 were fatal. Some

researchers think WNV has links to pesticides and other pollutants. A legal

action is currently underway in New York to stop the aerial spraying of the city

with Malathion, an organophosphate pesticide first used in the 1950s. The city

authorities want to use it to kill the mosquitoes it blames for WNV. The

litigants

maintain that the pesticide is more likely to cause the disease than prevent

it.

 

How does WHO distinguish the very few cases of AFP it says are caused by polio

from other cases of AFP? It cannot do this easily - as there is no

distinguishing symptom. It instead instructs doctors to send two samples of

excrement from AFP patients to one of the scores of laboratories it has set up

around the world. These inspect the excrement for poliovirus. If it is present,

then they register this as a case of poliomyelitis. If they don't find the

virus, then it is registered as a case of `Non-Poliomyelitis AFP'.(44) But this

WHO test is in effect meaningless. The poliovirus is by definition a type of

enterovirus, which means a stomach bug. Its presence in excrement is thus

natural - and does not indicate that it has damaged nerves.

 

WHO actively discourages doctors from looking for the poliovirus themselves in

cases of AFP, because `the virus is very hard to find' and research shows that

`there was no relationship between finding the virus and the course of the

disease'. It adds that presence of the virus in the central nervous system (CNS)

`appeared to have no diagnostic significance.' (45) And yet this is the very

reason given for the need to vaccinate against the poliovirus.

 

 

The Sabin polio vaccine has been chosen by WHO to finally eradicate the

poliovirus. It hopes to achieve this by inspecting the excrement from every case

of AFP reported. Should it find a case in which the poliovirus is present, then

the polio vaccine will be administered on a national scale so as to eliminate

the risk of its spreading. This has happened now so many times that in countries

like India children have received up to 10 doses of the vaccine.

 

But this is the strangest tool for the WHO to choose to eradicate the poliovirus

with. Sabin's vaccine, unlike Salk's, contains living mutated poliovirus. This

will breed in the vaccinated. WHO recommends this vaccine for the developing

world for this very reason, for the vaccinated widely spread the virus, to

infect and immunise those who have refused vaccination. WHO is thus strangely

choosing to spread a poliovirus in order to eliminate it!

 

WHO shows little concern over replacing the natural poliovirus in the

environment with an `unnatural' laboratory-made mutated poliovirus bred in

monkey cells. This is astonishing, given that this synthetic virus does not

remain stable, but continues to mutate. Poliovirus contains RNA - a type of

genetic coding that allows rapid mutation - and the vaccine's mutated poliovirus

has acquired a reputation among researchers for the speed with which it does

this. The virus can also reside inside humans for more than 20 years, making it

practically impossible to exterminate. And what is more shocking, but not

surprising given the nature of viruses, it is now reappearing in more mutated

forms in outbreaks on several continents.46 The danger now is that these might

now evolve to present a threat that the natural virus never did.

 

 

But why do we still have epidemics of infantile paralysis/AFP?

Organochlorine and organophosphate pesticides are back in widespread use. They

may be better regulated, but their toxins still accumulate in body fats until

they reach dangerous levels. The level of pesticide pollution on farmland in

America is now so bad that the US Environmental Protection Agency `estimates

that there are 10,000 to 20,000 cases of physician-diagnosed pesticide

poisonings' every year among agricultural workers. The CDC reports that

approximately one billion pounds of pesticides are now used every year in the

US. The global market for pesticides was estimated at $1,761 billion in 1989; it

would surely be bigger today.

 

The fact is, the victory won against pesticides in the early 1950s was very

short-lived. In 1955, the very year that Salk's vaccine was launched,

organophosphate pesticides were introduced into the US in partial replacement

for organochlorines like DDT. The organophosphates were perhaps less dangerous

than the organochlorines, but they were still highly neurotoxic.

 

It was only after the publication of Rachel Carson's sensational book Silent

Spring in 1962, telling how pesticides were endangering the survival of

America's symbolic bald eagles, that more meaningful restrictions were put on

organophosphates and the remaining organochlorines. They were banned in the US

in 1972, but not for long. In 1983 organophosphate pesticides were reintroduced.

 

During the ban, US pesticide manufacturers simply shifted markets. They

redirected most of their sales to the developing nations as infantile paralysis

ceased to be the `American disease'. The first polio epidemic in Manila happened

in 1972. Today the WHO encourages developing nations to use cheap DDT to kill

malaria-spreading mosquitoes, while it organises vaccination campaigns in the

same countries to fight the polio that DDT may cause. Effectively, the pesticide

companies are now partners to the WHO in its war against viruses. It's safer for

them to blame a virus for polio than pesticides: viruses can't be sued.

 

WHO is now raising over a billion dollars, not to cure those still suffering

from the original disease, not to look to see if toxins caused the children's

paralysis, but solely as a matter of pride to try to win for the polio vaccine a

seeming victory by eliminating a practically harmless virus.

 

It states on its website: `There is no cure for polio: its effects are

irreversible.' This is only so because public funds have been wasted on an

ineffective and wrongly targeted vaccine that cannot cure a single case of AFP.

This is nothing other than tragic for the thousands of children involved.

 

 

And finally, why is the WHO ignoring the possible role of pesticides, and

sticking with its vaccination assault?

Is it because in our increasingly specialised, non-holistic world, the

virologists involved with vaccines have not been talking to the toxicologists

involved with chemicals? Despite the fact that there are literally hundreds of

papers produced by the latter documenting how pesticides can harm our immune

systems, dramatically lower the number of our vital illness-fighting `T-cells',

and cause numerous other diseases as well as paralysis (47), this research

unfortunately does not seem to be filtering through to the vaccine industry,

which is still based on the theory that viruses must be the principal cause of

all paralytic epidemics.

 

One hopeful sign of progress was a recent report by the US National Academy of

Sciences, documenting how current levels of food contamination by

organophosphates can cause `acute poisoning in children'.(48) Another

ground-breaking piece of recent research focused on treating individuals

suffering from paralysis up to 40 years after becoming ill with poliomyelitis. A

group of 17 individuals were placed into an environment from which most toxic

substances had been removed, and were treated with antidotes to toxins.

`Long-term follow-up of the 14 improved patients showed general return of

wellbeing and renewed vigour,' and `eight became totally pain-free'. The

researchers concluded that `post-polio syndrome' was due to an `overload of

environmental pollutants on wounded target organs'.(49)

 

 

The evidence thus strongly suggests that the infantile paralysis (polio)

epidemics of the past were man-made disasters caused primarily by the gross

overuse of very dangerous pesticides, and that these epidemics are continuing.

The poliovirus, along with other viruses, may play a role, but it seems it is a

far smaller role than that given to it by the vaccine industry. The weight of

evidence also strongly suggests that the search for this virus, and for a

vaccine, was and is based on a flawed theory. This has tragically distracted the

medical establishment from the science that might have cured a large number of

children - and which could still do so.

 

The consequence of the campaign to spin the polio vaccine as a great success is

not simply that the public has been deceived. If toxins are the primary cause of

this disease, then countless thousands of paralysed children have never been

treated correctly. Many could have had their pain removed. Many might have been

able to walk again. This is not some abstract academic issue: it affects real

people, enduring real suffering and real paralysis. This is a story of a hidden

epidemic. It is surely time to cast aside the fog of doctrine and urgently

consider what can be done to cure such people.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SBC - Internet access at a great low price.