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In the late
1940s and early 1950s, a dark cloud hung over America: polio. The virus was taking a
savage toll, with thousands of children and adults
crippled or killed.
A solution appeared in 1955, when Jonas Salk astounded the medical world by discovering how to mass produce polio vaccine by growing it on the kidneys of rhesus monkeys. While there is no question that the Salk vaccine saved thousands from the ravages of polio, problems surfaced -- a health crisis which haunts our nation today. By 1960 they knew that when the live polio virus grown on monkey tissues was extracted for the vaccine, another virus was present as well: Simian Virus 40, known to cause brain cancer in research animals. The polio vaccine was contaminated. It appears our government didn't wish to create a public panic or to discredit the public health service. Instead of recalling the tainted vaccines, it quietly ordered the manufacturers to continue production and find a monkey free of SV-40. By 1963 a safer polio vaccine was in production; the rhesus monkey had been replaced with the African green monkey. But between 1955 and 1963, as many as 98 million Americans had received the contaminated SV-40 polio vaccines. | |
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Flash ahead
to Loyola University in the early 1990s. Michele Carbone, Assistant Professor
of Pathology, isolated fragments of
SV-40 in human cancers. The viral contaminate from the 1950s appeared in up to 40 percent of bone cancers and 60 percent of mesotheliomas, a particularly nasty form of
lung cancer. He believed this could explain why half of
the current mesotheliomas being treated were no longer linked with their traditional cause -- asbestos exposure.
Senior epidemiologist at the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Howard Strickler, used maps to help confirm the link between cancers and the tainted vaccine. People who lived in Massachusetts and Illinois who received identified lot numbers of the contaminated vaccine administered in the 1950s are now demonstrating ten times the rate of the osteosarcoma bone tumors as those who received vaccine free of the SV-40 contaminate in other parts of the country. Already sounding like bad science fiction, more terrible news was yet to come. Italian researchers found the monkey virus in between 14 and 83 percent of human brain tumors. Casting their net wider, studies began looking for the virus in normal individuals -- meaning people free of disease at the time of testing. SV-40 was found in 23 percent of blood samples and almost half of all sperm tested -- the virus could be transmitted sexually and through blood transfusions. Being a blood-borne organism, it is also suspected that it passes from mother to fetus. This led to discovery of the worst news of all: SV-40 has appeared in 61 percent of all new cancer patients -- patients too young to have received the contaminated vaccine administered forty years ago.
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Questions
should also be raised about today's polio vaccinations, required of every American infant and child by the Food and Drug Administration.
While public
health officials continue to emphasize the safety of current supplies of the
vaccine, Peter Reeve, FDA Virologist, acknowledges that the
administration abandoned independent testing of vaccine purity some
fifteen years ago -- that all quality assurance is done by the manufacturers the vaccines with no federal
oversight.
The government may not pay attention to the quality of these vaccines, but they have formulated a plan for their distribution. Federal vaccination policy advocated the use of live-virus oral polio vaccine (OPV) based on the belief the live virus shed in the body fluids of immunized infants would protect others through contact. The Centers for Disease Control insisted this was a safe practice, and emphasized that no one previously vaccinated could contract the disease in this manner. The public was never informed of this strategy, however, and no consent was ever obtained from the unknowing participants in this vaccination scheme. One hundred and twenty people, many previously vaccinated, contracted polio as a result of this practice. Adding insult to injury, the World Health Organization proclaimed that polio was eliminated from the Western Hemisphere in 1994. The only cases of polio occurring in the United States for the past seventeen years have been caused by the vaccine itself. It's not that all polio vaccine is unsafe; the injectable form of the vaccine (IPV) does not use a live virus and can't transmit the disease. But Wyeth-Lederle controls the supply of all the oral form of the vaccine in this country, with last year's sales about $230 million dollars. Wyeth lobbied hard against the CDC recommending increased use of IVP, which is made by a competitor. Yet in 1996, the CDC changed its recommendation from four doses of OPV to two doses each of IVP and OPV. Physicians can still give all four doses of OPV if they desire -- and often, they do. IVP vaccine costs $5.40 per dose, more than twice the OPV cost of $2.32 per dose. With the difference in cost favoring the use of OPV, and the current climate of regulating health care costs, clearer guidelines must come from the government if they truly expect to increase the use of the safer IVP vaccine.
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The controversy
of contaminated polio vaccine is far from over.
Microbiologist Howard Urnovitz provided significant evidence at
the Eighth Annual Houston Conference on AIDS that human immunodeficiency
virus type 1 (HIV-1) is a monkey hybrid virus which was produced when
320 thousand Africans were injected with polio virus contaminated with live
simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) in the late 1950s. Apparently viral fragments combine easily with other viruses to produce these
hybrids called chimeras.
This theory was confirmed by another research team at the University of California in San Francisco. But curiously, when two researchers applied to the National Institutes of Health for grants to confirm the presence of SIV and another monkey contaminant in polio vaccines, they were turned down. Why? "Almost 100 million Americans were exposed (to SV-40) through a government sponsored program," Dr. Urnovitz told the Boston Globe. "But for over 30 years, there has been virtually no government effort to see if anyone's been harmed by the exposure...The government will not fund science that makes it look culpable."
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Albion Monitor August 20, 1997 (http://www.monitor.net/monitor)
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