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VACCINE CANCER SCARE
By MICHAEL RELDA
98 million Americans received the polio
vaccine from 1955 to 1963.
- AP
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July 20, 2002
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The feds are close to winding up an
investigating into whether polio vaccines used in the 1950s and '60s
were contaminated with a virus that may cause several rare cancers
in humans.
The study could help determine whether today's Baby Boomers have
ticking time bombs from their childhood inoculations.
Michele Carbone, who is leading the research, told The Post he
wants to find how the monkey virus - known as "SV40" - that
contaminated the polio vaccine causes human cancer.
An independent committee of experts set up by the
Washington-based Institute of Medicine, under contract to the
Centers for Disease Control, met in Washington last week to rule on
the debate.
The group is to publish a report in September, staff director
Kathleen Stratton said, adding that the report may not bring an end
to the debate.
She said the study was "unusual because the exposure [to the
vaccine] was so long ago," and she stressed that polio vaccines used
now, at least in the United States, were free of SV40 contamination.
The contamination theory is being challenged by Howard Strickler,
an epidemiologist from New York's Albert Einstein College of
Medicine, who does not see any connection between the contaminated
polio vaccine and cancer.
Strickler says that diseased tissue samples where Carbone has
found SV40 were tainted due to laboratory mishandling.
Carbone, a pathologist at the Loyola University in Illinois, said
the virus-contaminated vaccine, cultured from monkey kidneys, was
given to 98 million Americans from 1955 to 1963.
Aware of the contamination, federal health officials ordered
polio vaccine manufacturers to screen for the virus as of 1961.
But concerned about widespread panic, they never told the public
about the virus and did not recall existing stocks.
Carbone cautioned that SV40 is not certain to cause cancer.
"It is well-established that cancer is caused by multiple
factors," he said. "There is never an inevitable outcome. Most
people exposed to the virus will not get cancer."
Carbone said one of the increased cancers is mesothelioma, a rare
and deadly disease that affects the cells in the lining of the chest
and the lung.
It is believed to be caused by asbestos, but SV40 is also a
factor, and the rates for the disease have gone up since 1950, when
it was practically unknown.
Other SV40-related diseases that have gone up in incidence are a
brain cancer called ependymoma and bone malignancies.
SV40 is also believed to an agent in non-Hodgkin's lymphomas.
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