Damning four-part set of articles by the UK's The Ecologist. Incredible reads, everyone should take the time to read these articles.
http://www.theecologist.org/archive_article.html?article=456Polio Special Part 1: A shot in the dark
Author: Janine RobertsPolio 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)
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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?
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http://www.theecologist.co.uk/archive_article.html?article=457&category=61Polio Special Part 2: Polio: Are pesticides to blame? and The case against the polio virus
Author: Janine RobertsPolio: are pesticides to blame?
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, Daniel 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.
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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)
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http://www.theecologist.org/archive_article.html?article=458Polio Special Part 3 : The hidden epidemic
Author: Janine RobertsThe hidden epidemic
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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.
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http://www.theecologist.org/archive_article.html?article=459Polio Special Part 4 : Poisonous vaccines
Author: Janine RobertsPoisonous vaccines
The 1950's race to be the first with a polio vaccine was led by Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin. Both designed polio vaccines intended to make people immune by exposing them to millions of polio virus. Both would be administered in multiple doses to several hundred million children.
Making so much vaccine required a vast amount of polio virus. There was a fierce debate over what kind of cell to grow this virus in. Some advocated breeding it in fertilized chicken eggs, others in human placental cells grown in laboratory vessels, and others in dishes containing the cells of wild-caught monkeys. Salk and Sabin decided to use monkeys, since they could provide large organs on which the virus would grow readily, and would be a few pence cheaper than the alternatives.
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Eddy continued to worry. In 1959 she took matters into her own hands. She went back unauthorised to put the Salk polio vaccine through more tests. She was horrified to find that, when she injected its growth medium into 23 hamsters, 20 of them grew large cancer tumours. She investigated further and found the Salk preparation had infected the hamsters with a monkey virus. This would be named Simian Virus 40 (SV40) as it was the 40th monkey virus discovered. Again her boss would react with fury, and ordered her to remain silent. This time she didn't. In 1960, at a meeting of the New York Cancer Society, she told them what happened when she had tested the Salk vaccine. She was immediately demoted by the National Institutes of Health. They took her laboratory from her and delayed publication of her research.
Meanwhile the Salk vaccine was proving ineffective. Children vaccinated with it were still coming down in hundreds with polio. The Journal of the American Medical Association would carry an article admitting, `It is now generally recognised that much of the Salk vaccine used in the US has been worthless.' (2) By 1959, preparations had begun to replace it with its main rival, the Sabin oral vaccine.
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