Polio Perspectives

Editorial for the Vaccine Risk Awareness Network (VRAN) Newsletter (June-Oct. 2001)

Edda West -- 10/20/2001

The Vaccine Risk Awareness Network Inc. was formed in Winlaw, British Columbia, in 1992 in response to growing parental concern about the safety of current vaccination programs in Canada. The following editorial was written by VRAN Coordinator and Newsletter Editor Edda West (eddawest@netidea.com) to accompany a Chronicillnet.org Special Report, "Will the Poliovirus Eradication Program Rid the World of Childhood Paralysis?" The editorial is reprinted here with the permission of the author and VRAN.

Time and again, when parents call VRAN searching for vaccine risk information, the question of polio comes up. Anxious mothers ask -- but what about polio -- isn't that an important vaccine to get? What if my child gets polio? Although most young parents today didn't live through the polio era, there is an inherited fear that lingers on -- a fear that is reinforced by health officials who use the threat of the resurgence of infectious diseases like polio to elicit compliance with mass vaccination programs. Statements like "these diseases are just a plane ride away" conjure images of predatory pathogens invading from more primitive corners of the world.

That the polio virus is the sole cause of polio is accepted by most people as gospel, and that the Salk and Sabin vaccines eradicated polio in the western world is etched into our collective consciousness as the major medical miracle of our time. But the history of polio and its vaccines is shrouded in a murky mist of politico/scientific manipulation, altered statistics, redefinition and reclassification of the disease, increased cases of vaccine induced paralytic polio, and monkey viruses transmitted by contaminated vaccines to millions of people worldwide. Live virus oral polio vaccine continues to be the only source of paralytic polio in North America. And the fallout continues as researchers find the imprint of SV40 virus in a wide range of cancers and tumours, even in people who were not exposed to contaminated polio vaccine.

Neenyah Ostrom's feature article invites us to broaden our concept of the disease called polio. Was the polio virus really to blame for all those cases of polio in the '40s & '50s -- and what factors other than a virus are precipitating polio-like paralytic disease?

The last case of indigenous wild poliovirus transmission in Canada and the American region, was "certified" in September 1994, says Health Canada. Yet, despite polio having been officially conquered in the western world, crippling disease still strikes young and healthy people, the majority being children between the ages of 6-10. In Canada, health officials eagerly monitor all cases of Acute Flaccid Paralysis because it is the yardstick by which they monitor polio.
Health Canada's Dr. Paul Varughese emphasizes that when symptoms of paralysis present "the single most important laboratory investigation is a stool specimen collected within two weeks of onset of paralysis for screening for wild or vaccine strain poliovirus, and that negative results of polio-specific investigations are as important as positive results for the evaluation of AFP cases." (1)

With a measure of pride, Health Canada says that 59 confirmed AFP cases were reported in 1999 in children under the age of 15. "The number of cases in 1999 represents a 40% increase over the number of cases reported in an equivalent reporting period for 1998, indicating continued improvement in reporting and that the majority (83.1%) of cases were diagnosed Guillain-Barre syndrome, followed by transverse myelitis (10.2%)." (1)

No speculation is offered as to what may have triggered the paralytic illnesses. Within VRAN, we know of several families whose children have suffered acute long term paralytic illness following MMR vaccination which later was reclassified as transverse myelitis. Yet the attending medical experts vociferously deny a vaccine association. One can almost hear a collective sigh of relief every time a paralysis is diagnosed as AFP -- never mind what caused it -- it's not polio!

Within days of launching the Salk vaccine in the U.S. in April 1955, 79 polio cases and 11 deaths were caused by the Cutter vaccine, which was found to contain live virus. Assuming contagion patterns, the numbers were later increased to 204 cases.(4) A fascinating chapter in the Rodale Encyclopedia of Common Diseases (1962) gives a year by year report of the Salk polio vaccine drama. Fast tracked through government approval processes, rigorous safety testing thrown to the winds, and a massive propaganda campaign oiled to the nines, the vaccine was thrust onto a fear filled public.

As the Salk vaccine program expanded, cases of paralytic polio began to increase -- "in 1959 more than 5,000 paralytic polio cases occurred -- 50% more than in 1958, and 100% more than in 1957. This trend developed in spite of 300,000,000 doses of Salk vaccine administered in the nation (U.S.) by the end of 1959. Dr. Harold Fletcher predicted in the Journal of the American Medical Association (April 9, 1960) that of a probable 6,000 paralytic cases expected by the end of 1960, 1,000 were likely to have had 3 shots." (2)

Rodale offers some prophetic insight: "Beneath all the hullabaloo over the Salk polio vaccine runs a consistent thread of hesitation and doubt expressed by responsible medical men throughout the world. There are doubts as to its safety; doubts as to whether this is the best way to make the vaccine; doubts as to whether, even if the vaccine does conquer the present-day forms of polio virus, we will perhaps then be confronted with a host of viruses just a little different, each of which will also have to have its own vaccine." (2)

One of the heroes that emerged during the Salk polio vaccine debacle was Dr. Herbert Ratner, MD. As public health director in Oak Park Illinois, assistant professor of Preventive Medicine and Public Health at Stritch School of Medicine in Chicago, and editor of the Bulletin of the American Association of Public Health Physicians, Dr. Ratner took on the corrupt polio vaccine establishment.

In an eloquent editorial in the Bulletin, he criticized the blatant manipulation of statistics, the "double standard" in reporting vaccine induced paralytic polio, and the secrecy that shrouded the 1954 polio vaccine field trials saying, "One questions the propriety of imposing upon the medical profession at large, and local health officers in particular, an 'enforced' inoculation program in the absence of making available to them the written report on the basis of which the program was presumably launched. Such a failure has the effect of converting the medical profession into slave technicians." (3) Dr. Ratner was referring to the Francis Report -- a key evaluation of the field trials that tested the vaccine on humans. Fraudulently, it failed to disclose to the medical community "that those who contracted polio after their first inoculation and before their second inoculation were placed on the 'not inoculated' list"! (4)

Citing the prudent approach of other countries, Ratner hoped to infuse a measure of sanity into the chaos. "All European countries, with the exception of Denmark, have discontinued their programs -- even Denmark is reported to have found live virus in the Salk vaccine . . . English authorities have cancelled the Salk vaccine program as too dangerous." And quoting Dr. G.S. Wilson, director of the British Public Health Laboratory Service, "I do not see how any vaccine prepared by Salk's method can be guaranteed safe" and, " . . . Canada has postponed its vaccination program until the early part of 1956 in keeping with its earlier prudent approach." (3)

In May of 1960, Dr. Ratner chaired a panel discussion, at the 120th Annual Meeting of the Illinois Medical Society to review the increasing rise in paralytic polio in the U.S. The proceedings were reprinted in the August, 1960, Illinois Medical Journal which exposed the Salk vaccine as a frank and ineptly disguised fraud. One of the experts on the panel, statistician Dr. Bernard Greenberg, who went on to testify at Congressional hearings, revealed how data had been manipulated to hide the dangers and ineffectiveness of the vaccine from the pubic. Dr. Greenberg explained that the perceived overall reduction in polio cases was achieved by changing the criteria by which polio was diagnosed. (2)

Prior to 1954, all that was required was an examination on admittance and another 24 hours later; if the classic polio symptoms were discernible, the patient was considered to have polio. No lab test, and no residual paralysis were required to establish a paralytic polio case definitely. When the new criteria was established in 1954, for a case to be reportable as polio, residual paralysis had to linger for 60 days or longer. From this time onward, all cases in which paralysis lasted less than 60 days would no longer be classified as polio! Overnight, the majority of cases that would have been diagnosed as polio, were now shifted into a new disease category, cocksackie virus, or aseptic viral meningitis.

In Canada, the Dominion Bureau of Statistics issued an official bulletin in June 1959 titled Poliomyelitis Trends, 1958. "Data shown in this report are confined to paralytic poliomyelitis only. It may be noted that the Dominion Council of Health at its 74th meeting in October 1958 recommended that for the purposes of national reporting and statistics the term non-paralytic poliomyelitis be replaced by 'meningitis, viral or aseptic,' with the specific viruses shown where known." (13)

Dr. Ratner continued to stir up the dirt. Having already publicly stated that "in 1957 the largest producer of Salk vaccine in the U.S. had several million dollars worth of vaccine on hand which did not pass the minimum potency requirements of the U.S. Public Health Service . . . and that subsequently, the Division of Biological Standards reinterpreted the minimum requirements to make possible the commercial utilization of the vaccine," he then dropped another bombshell in the February 16, 1961 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. Ratner denounced the Salk vaccine as "an unstandardized product of an unstandardized process" and that the 335 million polio shots given until now were a waste because they were too weak to be effective and that one's chances against polio, regardless of the previous number of shots, were no more dependable than those of someone who had not been inoculated at all. (2)

In her soon to be published book Vaccination and The Making of Mass Mind, author, educator and historian Walene James exposes the ruthless methods employed by the medical/pharmaceutical industry to forward their toxic agenda with the complicity of government and the media as willing co-conspirator. Having lived through the polio era, she bears witness to the hideous charade that masqueraded as a public health measure. With keen insight, she dissects the statistical and epidemiologcal evidence that was suppressed to forward the big lie.

Walene James gives voice to the many medical people whose views disagreed with the official polio (viral caused) construct, many of whom questioned polio being a contagious disease. Some medical people had already begun to link paralytic polio-like illnesses as a response to the increasing use of serious neurotoxins like DDT, lead and arsenic compounds. Dr. Ralph R. Scobey presented "compelling evidence" that the real cause of polio is not viral, but a response to poisons in a series of articles published in The Archives of Pediatrics (1946-53). (4) Dr. Scobey's work can be viewed on line at the Images of Poliomyelitis website. (10)

Revisiting the work of numerous doctors, naturopaths and chiropractors whose natural therapies helped heal polio victims, James cites the tremendous work done by Dr. Frederick Klenner, MD, whose unequivocal success with vitamin C in healing polio and many other diseases, including recovery from pesticide poisoning, is best described as a true gift to humanity. (5) Another important discovery was forwarded by North Carolina physician, Dr. Benjamin Sandler, MD, who found that polio could be prevented by a diet that eliminated refined carbohydrates, sugar, candy, cookies, pop and ice cream, which were ingested in enormous quantities in the summer months when polio was rampant. His research showed that hypoglycemia (low blood sugar) was a common disorder in children and adolescents and was at the root of polio attacking this age group. Low blood sugar is readily induced by wrong diet, followed by overexertion. Many people followed Sandler's recommendations, and the incidence of polio in North Carolina dropped from 2,402 cases in 1948 to 214 cases in 1949 when the country as a whole showed an increase in the number of cases in that time frame. (4)

Around the turn of the 20th century, people began reporting paralytic illness after smallpox vaccination. (15) By the 1920s, infantile paralysis (later renamed polio) began to emerge as an important new disease that often afflicted the limb that had been vaccinated. And later, when typhoid vaccine, then diphtheria, tetanus vaccines and pertussis vaccines gained widespread use, illness and paralytic episodes following vaccination became common knowledge. Provocation polio is a well known phenomenon precipitated by "diverse factors that provoke or increase the severity of polio in its victims, or localize it to a certain section in the nervous system." Some of these factors included: vaccination, trauma, tonsillectomies, pertussis vaccines, and the injection of numerous substances such as cortisone, bismuth, guanine and penicillin.(9)

Strangely enough, polio is the only disease whose rise has been linked to improvement in sanitation and hygiene. Epidemiological theory speculates that early on in the 20th century, people in the upper classes who could afford a cleaner environment became more susceptible to polio than poorer class people who lived in more primitive conditions, where early exposure to the virus enhanced immunity readily acquired in infancy and early childhood. Undoubtedly, the decline of breastfeeding among the upper classes played an equally important role in the increase of paralytic diseases involving enteroviruses. The infant immune system evolves from the gut, and intestinal integrity determines whether the baby's immune function will be weak or strong. The most critical immune protection arises from the foundation laid down by breastfeeding -- a foundation that cannot be derived from any source other than mother's milk.

Dr. Derrick B. Jelliffe, MD, describes colostrum and breast milk as an "antiseptic intestinal paint," protecting intestinal epithelial surfaces until the infant's own immune mechanisms mature. He explains that "the proven effect of sIgA [secretory Immuneglobulin A] appears to be enteral, including as a mucosal protection, particularly against the dominant pathological bacteria in the newborn, and especially pathogenic E. coli, and enteroviruses such as polio virus and probably such newly recognized pathogens as rotaviruses . . . as well as other microbacteria, including strptococci, staphylococci, and pneumococci." Dr. Jelliffe lays particular emphasis on the crucial role of human milk in infant health: "This is extremely important as not only is infective diarrhoea a serious neonatal disease, but in addition many systemic generalized infections, such as some cases of septicaemia of the newborn and poliomyelitis, commonly enter via the intestinal tract." (7)

Polio is in a class of eneteroviruses -- meaning they can colonize the gut. In a discussion paper on CFS (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome), Dr. William Campbell Douglas, MD says that many researchers view CFS as another form of polio. "Modern genetics has confirmed the genetic similarity between polio viruses, coxsackie, and another group called the echo viruses. Before the advent of the Salk and Sabin vaccines, there were only three polio viruses. Now, with the drastic alteration of the human gut over the years as a result of these vaccines, there are at least 72 viral strains that can cause polio-like diseases." (6)

"When the coxsackie viruses were first isolated from CFS patients, it wasn't realized that we were simply dealing with a new form of polio. This new polio was caused by the replacement of the polio viruses with their brothers, the coxsackie viruses. As the researchers didn't get the connection at first, these new polio cases were labelled 'post-polio syndrome,' 'chronic fatigue syndrome,' and 'myalgic encephalomyelitis.' By altering the population's resistance to a particular organism, we alter the balance of infectious agents in the environment. The circulation of wild polio viruses 1-3 has declined through vaccination. However, this has left us open to the other 69 polio-related viruses, which have thrived." (6)

Shortly before his death in 1997, Dr. Herbert Ratner contacted SV40 virus researcher Dr. Michele Carbone and gave him seven sealed vials of polio vaccine that had been stored in his basement fridge since 1955. He had saved those vials for 42 years waiting for the right person to inherit them -- someone perhaps a little like himself, a man of integrity, a lover of truth, a whistleblower -- you could call it a kind of divine cosmic joke.

I had the extraordinary privilege of meeting Herbert Ratner on a number of occasions at La Leche League International conferences. He served on their medical advisory board for many years, along with Dr. Robert Mendelsohn -- two fearless mavericks who dared to expose the lies of the vaccine establishment.

Herbert Ratner was a philosopher, a theologian, a passionate advocate of family values and children's health, homebirth, and of course breastfeeding. He also published Child & Family, a journal on attachment parenting. He was a tremendous, loving human being. I loved his lectures -- they changed my life in the most profound way. "Love is the cement of society and the prime function of the family is to raise children who know how to receive love -- who know how to give love, who develop the kind of self-respect and love for themselves they must have if they are going to love anybody else. We have to do everything possible to give the newborn infant a sense of worth. The function of the family is to turn the newborn individual into an adult who is emotionally secure and capable of loving because love is what keeps us together." (From a 1979 lecture.)

On analyzing Dr. Ratner's vaccine vials, Dr. Carbone made a startling discovery. "Not
only was the vaccine contaminated, it contained a second form of the virus -- an 'archetypal' SV40 strain." Explains William Carlsen in his in-depth review of SV40 viral research, "Although manufacturers switched from rhesus monkeys to SV40-free green African monkeys to grow the bulk vaccine in 1961, they have continued to use potentially contaminated polio seed strains originally grown on the rhesus monkey (kidney)tissue to start the bulk vaccine process." (8)

"Manufacturers check the purity of their vaccine with a series of 14-day tests to detect whether any SV40 slipped through. But when Carbone replicated the tests, he found that the second, slower growing 'archetypal' strain took 19 days to emerge." Carbone noted in a published report that it is possible that this second strain of SV40 had been evading manufacturers' screening procedures for years -- and continued to infect vaccine recipients after 1962. (8)

"By the end of 1996, dozens of scientists reported finding SV40 in a variety of bone cancers and a wide range of brain cancers, which had risen 30 percent over the previous 20 years. Then, Italian researchers reported finding SV40 in 45 percent of the seminal fluid samples and 23 percent of the blood samples they had taken from healthy donors." This meant that SV40 was probably spreading through sexual activity, transmitted from mother to child, raising the possibility that the virus may now be incorporated into our genetic makeup. Another possibility is that, undetected by vaccine manufacturers, the virus continues to contaminate current stocks of polio vaccine. At a recent SV40 conference, it was revealed that funding has been granted to develop an anti-SV40 virus vaccine! (8) And so goes the disease merry-go-round: create more vaccines to target the diseases caused by vaccines in the first place. It is a very old game.

Back in 1962, Rodale reported that spraying programs of DDT were carried out "regularly in many parts of our country as a precaution against polio?..we have never heard of any polio epidemic being stopped by spraying with DDT and we have heard of localities where the polio incidence rose after the DDT spraying." (2)

Today 40 years after Rodale's observations, New York researcher Jim West has assembled an impressive body of evidence that traces the parallel rise of polio with the widespread indiscriminate use of highly neurotoxic chemicals used in increasing intensity in the 20th century. He has created an extraordinary website called Images of Poliomyelitis -- A Critique of Scientific Literature.(10) Early in the century, lead and arsenic compounds were the favourites to control pests in agriculture. Later on in the '40s & '50s, powerful organochlorine nerve poisons like DDT & BHC (benzene hexachloride) were used as pesticides, for agricultural use, home and gardens and even sprayed over densely populated areas to control mosquitoes, exposing people to unprecedented poisonous chemical blasts. These neurotoxic chemicals were dumped into the environment by the billions of pounds. (10)

DDT was a popular chemical used in the dairy industry, so in the peak polio years, during the '40s and '50s, children were heavily exposed to high levels of contamination in milk and cow's milk based infant formulas, which had become a popular substitute for breast milk. In retrospect, we can see the multiple disaster that unfolded through toxic contamination of milk, a primary food ingested by most children, as well as the wholesale deprivation of the basic immune protection afforded by breastfeeding -- which in that era had become nearly extinct with only an estimated 5-10% of mothers initiating breastfeeding at birth. DDT was phased out in 1968 yet continues to be exported to the developing world where it is still widely used today as an agricultural chemical, and for mosquito control.

Jim West has create a composite graph of the most persistent pesticides: lead, arsenic, DDT and BHC (benzene hexachloride), a persistent, organochlorine pesticide that is several times more lethal than DDT, in terms of LD50 (lethal dosage required to kill 50% of a test population. The graph represents 3.1 billion pounds of persistent pesticides. (See the graph on Jim West's web site, Images of Poliomyelitis -- A Critique of Scientific Literature.)

These four chemicals were not selected arbitrarily. These are representative of the major pesticides in use during the last major polio epidemic. They persist in the environment as neurotoxins that cause polio-like symptoms, polio-like physiology, and were dumped onto/into human food at dosage levels far above that approved by the FDA. They directly correlate with the incidence of various neurological diseases called 'polio' before 1965.They were utilized in the "most intensive campaign of mass poisoning in known human history." (quote from Biskind) (10)

"In 1983, via new legislation, DDT was allowed back into the U.S. marketplace, but only in pesticide blends. Within only a few months of this re-entry, a new kind of polio epidemic suddenly occurred. It was labeled 'post-polio,' the re-emergence of polio symptoms in former victims. This has involved approximately 600,000 victims. Like most of the data on this website, this correlation is not even a whisper in the mainstream media." (11) Central nervous system diseases other than polio continue in the U.S. and throughout the world: acute flaccid paralysis, chronic fatigue syndrome, encephalitis, meningitis, muscular sclerosis. A paper entitled "The Environmental Aspects Of The Post Polio Syndrome" explores the correlation. (12)

I can remember walking to Wellesley Park in Toronto with my three-year-old daughter in 1979 and fleeing in outrage because the city weed control people were there spraying herbicides all around the swings and slides. I remember thinking, "they" (city officials & parks department) must be insane to spray toxic chemicals where children play. Phone calls and complaints to city officials fell on deaf ears. I heard years later that herbicide spraying in children's play areas was discontinued.

Today's parents of autistic and neuroimmune injured children, understand the devastating effects of exposure to neurotoxic substances, in particular mercury and other toxic chemicals injected into children via vaccines. We're talking about toxic exposures off the scale of insanity -- of injecting nerve and immune system destroying poisons directly into the internal fragile micro-environment of the young child. (14) Naively, we have trusted our precious children to the experts who have violated their sacred oath of "First Do No Harm." We are witness to the most shameful chapter in human history.

Children are the most vulnerable members of the human family. How gently and tenderly we cradle them when they are tiny infants. How carefully and lovingly we nurture them and guard them from harm. How diligently we protect their well being in their early years. How deeply we commit all our love and resources to ensure that they have the best opportunities to grow in the healthiest way possible. We hold them as the most precious gift that life can bless us with. What quality of commitment will it take to heal and protect our children? It will be the power of Truth as the driving force that will propel us to move heaven and earth to make this world a healthier and safer place for all the children.

Appendix & References