More on Polio cause industrial & ag pollution?

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More on Polio cause industrial & ag pollution?

Another very interesting article

Polio -

" Yet there is a mass of historic evidence that

suggests it is not caused by a virus but by

industrial and agricultural pollution. "

http://www.theecologist.org/archive_detail.asp?content_id=278

(not all of article here - rest at

http://www.sfimc.net/news/2004/06/1698043_comment.php?theme=1 )

Polio: the virus and the vaccine

There is a rarely mentioned epidemic raging in

the world today, one that is crippling children

in more than 100 countries. In extreme cases the

disease starts with a fever, which is followed by

vomiting, delirium and spreading pain. Within

days of being infected, the motor-neurone cells

in victims' spines cease to function properly.

Pain intensifies as victims' limbs are paralysed.

In the very worst cases, their chests are also

paralysed, which prevents them from breathing.

Even when the children recover, the illness often

returns in later life. Health authorities say it

has no cure. The number of cases increased by

over 250 per cent worldwide between 1996 and 2003

1. It is a disease with a long history and many

names. The condition's official name now is

'Acute Flaccid Paralysis' but it was once known

as 'infantile paralysis'/ 'poliomyelitis' (polio

for short). Some people called it 'the crippler'.

A shot in the dark 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.

Date:01/05/2004 Author:Janine

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

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 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 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 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

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 lin 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 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 sackie

virus. This news was grimly received. Their

planned polio vaccine would not work against the

sackie. 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

Enders and 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 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 Aseptic meningitis cases

1951-1960 70,083 0

1961-1982 589 102,999

1983-1992 0 117,366

(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:

'sackie 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 sackie 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 sackie 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

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

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.

Polio: are pesticides to blame?

Endocrinologist Morton Biskind said the spread of

polio after WWII was caused by the 'most

intensive campaign of mass poisoning in human

history' - the spraying of some 3.1 billion pounds of pesticides.

The first epidemic of poliomyelitis in a tropical

nation was contemporaneous with the introduction

of the pesticide DDT in that country. Towards the

end of WWII, US military camps in the Philippines

started to be sprayed daily with DDT in order to

kill flies.29 Writing in The Journal of the

American Medical Association two years after the

war, Albert Sabin reported that poliomyelitis

became, after conflict, the major cause of death

among the troops stationed at these camps. And

yet unsprayed neighbouring populations were not

affected by the disease.30 At the end of the war,

the US military's stocks of DDT were sold onto

the public - despite the gravest warnings from establishment scientists.

In 1944, the US federal research centre the

National Institutes of Health reported that DDT

damaged the same part of the spinal cord (the

anterior horn cells) that is damaged in infantile

paralysis. Endocrinologist Dr Morton Biskind

further described in 1949 how DDT caused 'lesions

in the spinal cord resembling those in human

polio in animals'. He commented: 'Despite the

fact that DDT is a highly lethal poison for all

species of animals, the myth has become prevalent

among the general population that it is safe for

man in virtually any quantity. Not only is it

used in households with reckless abandon so that

sprays and aerosols are inhaled, the solutions

are permitted to contaminate skin, bedding and

other textiles.' The same year in Germany,

Dresden found that acute DDT poisoning produced

'degeneration in the central nervous system' that

seemed identical to that reported in severe cases of infantile paralysis. 31

Yet DDT was used to replace lead arsenate as a

pesticide in fruit farming and with which to wash

dairy cows. Heavy levels of DDT were soon

reported in milk supplies. The organochlorine

pesticide DDE (which is several times more

dangerous than DDT) was also widely used in the

US. Both were known to penetrate the blood-brain

barrier that protects the human brain from viral

invasion. Housewives were actually advised to

spray DDT to stop infantile paralysis. Children's

bedrooms had wallpaper pre-soaked in DDT.

Epidemics of infantile paralysis started to occur every year.

By 1952 the number of cases of infantile

paralysis was three times higher than the figure for 1940.

Biskind treated over 200 patients affected with

such neurological disorders. He found that many

of these patients recovered when foods

contaminated with pesticides were removed from

their diets; this applied particularly to milk

products. Biskind found high concentrations of

DDT in butter purchased in New York. In 1949 he

wrote: 'Though it was originally observed in 1945

that DDT is absorbed through the skin,

accumulates in the body fat and appears in the

milk of animals, it has recently become almost

universal practice to spray cattle with DDT…

Although young animals are much more susceptible

to the effects of DDT than adults, so far as the

available literature is concerned, it does not

appear that the effects of such concentrations on

infants and children have even been considered.' 32

Despite the official complacency about substances

like DDT and DDE, a few doctors did consider the

effects of toxins. Some reported successfully

treating paralysed patients with dimercaprol, an

anti-toxin that is still used in hospitals since

it 'binds' heavy metal poisons such as arsenic

and lead and renders them non-toxic. In 1951 Dr

Irwin Eskwith reported successfully using

dimercaprol to cure a child suffering from bulbar

paralysis, the most severe form of infantile

paralysis.33 A medical journal also reported that

17 acute cases of polio were cured after

treatment with very large doses of another

anti-toxin - ascorbic acid.34 A year earlier

investigators from the US Food and Drug

Administration (FDA) had announced: `The finding

of [liver] cell alteration at dietary levels as

low as five parts per million of DDT, and the

considerable storage of the chemical [in body

fats]... makes it extremely likely that the

potential hazard of DDT has been underestimated.'

Polio epidemics had been becoming more and more

severe from 1945 onwards. Biskind reported that

this was due to the `most intensive campaign of

mass poisoning in known human history', the

spraying of some 3.1 billion pounds of pesticides.(35)

In a 1953 paper published in the American Journal

of Digestive Diseases Biskind said: `It was known

by 1945 that DDT is stored in the body fat of

mammals and appears in [their] milk... Yet, far

from admitting a causal relationship [between DDT

and polio] so obvious that in any other field of

biology it would be instantly accepted, virtually

the entire apparatus of communication, lay and

scientific alike, has been devoted to denying,

concealing, suppressing, distorting and attempts

to convert into its opposite the overwhelming

evidence. Libel, slander and economic boycott

have not been overlooked in this campaign.' (36)

US farmers had been officially recommended to

stop washing cattle with DDT in 1949, but this

advice was not enforced and was mostly ignored.

In 1950 supplies of US milk were found to contain

up to twice the amount of DDT that was needed to

produce severe illness in humans. Biskind and

fellow poliomyelitis researcher Ralph Scobey were

invited to testify to Congress in 1950 and in

1951, respectively.(37) They drew up a formidable

case for banning DDT, citing the work of many

scientists. In 1951 the US Public Health Service

said: `DDT is a delayed-action poison. Due to the

fact that it accumulates in the body tissues,

especially in females, the repeated inhalation or

ingestion of DDT constitutes a distinct health

hazard. The deleterious effects are manifested

principally in the liver, spleen, kidneys and

spinal cord... DDT is excreted in the milk of cows and of nursing mothers.'

Effective action was slow to be taken, however:

the health establishment was in total denial as

far as pesticide effects on humans were

concerned. Precautions were put in place too

slowly and too late to stop the greatest of all

the infantile paralysis epidemics - that of 1952,

when some 57,700 cases were reported across the

US, of which a third had paralytic symptoms.

By the end of the 1952 epidemic there was a vast

amount of evidence to suggest that infantile

paralysis was not caused by a virus:

1 Farm and domestic animals were paralysed at the

same time as children. Chickens that had become

lame were found to have suffered motor neurone

damage. The poliovirus only infected humans and

thus could not have caused the animals'

paralysis. Exposure to poisons, on the other

hand, can damage many different species at the same time.

2 Most cases of paralysis were incurred within 48

hours of each other. That is not the pattern for

infectious outbreaks, which start slowly, grow

faster as the infection spreads and then diminish

as immunity develops. It is the pattern of a mass poisoning event.

3 Parents reported that some children fell ill

immediately after eating fresh fruit Fruit was

sprayed heavily with lead arsenate at the time.

4 The illness was relieved by the administration

of antidotes for chemical poisoning, and

chemicals associated with poisoning appeared in

the diseased tissues of the victims of paralytic

polio - including oestrogenic chemicals now

widely associated with environmental poisoning.

5 The spread of poliomyelitis was not affected by

the closure of schools, as it should have been if

the disease was infectious. Nor did close contact

with paralysed children spread paralysis. Yet the

virus presumed to cause the illness was highly

infectious, as was shown by the widespread

presence of antibodies for it among healthy individuals.

6 There was little or no correlation between the

prevalence of polio antibodies in the population

and the incidence of paralytic polio. In fact

patients deemed to be recovering from paralytic

polio were found to `be completely lacking' in polio antibodies.(38)

7 And the most virulent viral epidemics occur

when viruses are newly introduced into

populations. The poliovirus had been present long

before the epidemics started. The use of chemical

pesticides, in contrast, began just before the epidemics started.

Slowly, the US authorities began to act.

Following the FDA secured legislative

restrictions on the use of pesticides in 1954(39)

and 1956(40), the incidence of infantile

paralysis in the US plummeted immediately. By the

time Jonas Salk's polio vaccine was publicly

released in 1955, the level of infantile

paralysis in the US was already below a half of

what it had been in 1952. The figures for the UK

were even more dramatic: the incidence of

infantile paralysis fell by more than 82 per cent

between 1950 and the first mass administration of the vaccine in 1957.

The case against the polio virus

When it was eventually photographed using an

electron microscope, the poliovirus was shown to

be tiny: an elegant sphere made up of triangular

equal-sized sides, and in all just 25 millionths

of a millimetre across. Is this `poliovirus' the

cause of infantile paralysis / polio? Or is it an

ancient and harmless companion of the human race?

All the evidence suggests the latter:

1 It had been around humans for thousands of

years and in nature only reproduces in human

throats or guts. Such viruses are normally

totally harmless, since we have become adapted to

them and they to us. It lived in the dirt

ingested by human infants, and did not hurt them.

Instead it helped activate their immune system,

giving them a stronger resistance to illness.

2 If it were the dangerous pathogen that causes

infantile paralysis, then it would be more common

in countries with infantile paralysis epidemics,

and less common in countries with no infantile

paralysis epidemics. But the reverse is true.

3 To say it causes polio may violate one of the

most famous laws of virology. These are called

the Koch Postulates. They set up the rules for

declaring a disease to be caused by a virus. The

1st Postulate states that the virus must be found

in every case of the disease as defined by its

symptoms - but the poliovirus was not always

present in such cases of poliomyelitis.(25)

4 It widely infects children without causing them

any illness. The Koch Postulates lay down that if

it causes a disease, it should do so whenever it infects.

5 It seemed mostly to infect the cleanest

children of middle-class parents. Infectious

viruses are not supposed to behave in this way:

they are indiscriminate as to social class, and

do not thrive in conditions of good hygiene.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

(CDC) has published a theory to explain this

extraordinary behaviour. The children of US

middle-class parents were uniquely liable to fall

ill with infantile paralysis because in their

infancy parents kept them away from the dirt in

which the virus lives. This meant these children

were not infected when it was safest - while

protected by their mothers' milk. Once again,

this theory contradicted everything known about

infectious illness: good hygiene nearly always

stops epidemics; with infantile paralysis, the

CDC argued, good hygiene was the cause.(26)

Furthermore, the CDC's theory was based on the

assumption that working-class children are

uniquely exposed to ordinary dirt. Yet surely

middle-class children also go out into the

garden? The theory was also conceived without

checking medical reports on the early epidemics

of infantile paralysis. Referring to a 1908

epidemic in Massachusetts, US health inspector

Herbert Emerson noted that most cases occurred in

households with no sewers and low hygiene. If the

CDC's theory was sound these children would have

had antibodies and been immune to polio. In

reality, they were the ones who fell ill.

6 If guilty of causing paralysis, it would have

to travel from the gut through the formidable

blood-brain barrier that protects our brains and

spinal cords. We still have not observed it doing

this, despite many decades of intense research.

7 It is rarely found in human blood - the easiest

route from the gut to the blood-brain barrier.

Yet this is where Jonas Salk's vaccine was supposed to intercept it.

8 It has never been observed reproducing in victims' motor neurone cells.27

An alternative proposition

Poliomyelitis researcher Dr Ralph Scobey

suggested in 1954 a reason why viruses might be

found on damaged motor neuron cells in cases of

infantile paralysis. He posited that the body

itself might activate or produce these viruses,

perhaps when under threat or to clean up cellular

damage. While `the fundamental cause of human

poliomyelitis appears to be a poison or toxin',

Scobey said, `the virus is synthesised or

activated within the human body as a result of

the poisoning'. He suggested that the virus might

remain `dormant' within cells until something

activates it. We now know that the poliovirus can

be dormant. It is also widely known that

toxic-damaged tissues attract viruses. One of the

standard tests for toxins, the Ames Assay,

utilises the fact that if viruses mutate and

multiply in the presence of a certain amount of a

chemical then that amount is dangerously toxic.

Scobey went on to list anti-toxins that had

proved effective in curing polio, citing 11

scientific papers written between 1936 and 1949.(28)

--------------------------------------------------------

Sheri Nakken, former R.N., MA, Hahnemannian Homeopath

Vaccination Information & Choice Network, Nevada City CA & Wales UK

Vaccines - http://www.wellwithin1.com/vaccine.htm

Vaccine Dangers & Homeopathy Online/email courses