TT h e re is a rarely mentioned epidemic raging in the world today, one that is crippling

c h i l d ren in more than 100 countries. In extreme cases the disease starts with a

f e v e r, which is followed by vomiting, delirium and spreading pain. Within days of

being infected, the motor- n e u rone cells in victims’ spines cease to function pro p e r l y.

Pain intensifies as victims’ limbs are paralysed. In the very worst cases, their chests

a re also paralysed, which prevents them from breathing. Even when the childre n

re c o v e r, the illness often re t u rns in later life. Health authorities say it has no cure .

The number of cases increased by over 250 per cent worldwide between 1996 and

2 0 0 31. It is a disease with a long history and many names. The condition’s off i c i a l

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 special report by Janine Roberts

Polio: the viru sand the vaccine

3 6 T H E E C O L O G I S T M A Y 2 0 0 4

disease, particularly lead, arsenic andm e rc u ry. In 1824 the English scientist JohnCooke stated: ‘The fumes of these metals,or the receptance of them in solution intothe stomach, often cause paralysis.’ 2

In 1878 the link between palsy andtoxins was strengthened when AlfredVulpian found that dogs dosed with leadsuffered the same damage in their motor-neurone cells as found in the humanvictims of infantile paralysis.3 T h e

During the first half of the 20thc e n t u ry infantile paralysis surgedlike a bush fire, moving from place

to place, afflicting large numbers ofchildren, but only in the industrialisedWest. Prior to these outbreaks it affectedv e ry few and was often called ‘palsy’. Inthe 19th century scientists gave it thename ‘poliomyelitis’, referring to theinflammation of the grey nerves of thespinal column in cases of paralysis.Poisonous metalswere suspected ofcausing this

three cotton mills, and in settlementsdownstream from those mills. Nearbythere were also orchards on which leadarsenates were almost certainly in use.They were also living only a shortdistance downstream from the locationof the Vermont outbreak.

A further epidemic in Massachusettsin 1908 caused enormous public concern,but, despite the evidence that exposure totoxins might have been responsible, theinvestigating health officials overlookedthe newly introduced pesticides; theythought them essential to their waragainst viruses and bacteria – and to thefinancial health of the agriculturali n d u s t ry. Thus, the children paralysed inMassachusetts were not treated withtoxin antidotes to see if these wouldbenefit them. Instead, parents wereadvised to keep their children clean whilethe scientists, distracted by the thenbrand new theory that all epidemics hadto be caused by infectious germs, lookedfor the virus ‘responsible’.

In 1908 two scientists working inAustria, Karl Landsteiner and Erw i nP o p p e r, reported that they might have

found an ‘invisible virus’ that had causedthese epidemics. They had made theird i s c o v e ry, they claimed, after making asuspension in water of minced diseasedspinal cord from a nine-year-old victim ofinfantile paralysis. They had tested thisnoxious suspension by injecting one or

Russian Popow discovered in 1883 thatthe same damage could be done witha r s e n i c .4 This should have sentshockwaves through the medicalestablishment as the arsenic-basedpesticide Paris Green had been widelyused since 1870 to stop Codling mothcaterpillars ruining apple crops. Butstrangely it didn’t .

In 1892 Paris Green was replaced inMassachusetts by the more toxic pesticide

lead arsenate. Two years later the firstrecorded epidemic of infantile paralysisstruck in Massachusetts’ neighbouringstate of Vermont. The outbreak wasinvestigated by Dr Charles Caverly, whoreported that it was probably caused by atoxin rather than a micro-organism.Caverly said: ‘It usually occurred infamilies of more than one child, and asno efforts were made at isolation it wasv e ry certain it was non-contagious.’ 5

Lead arsenate rapidly became theprincipal pesticide used on fruit andberries throughout the industrial world.In 1907 calcium arsenate was introducedfor use primarily on cotton crops and incotton mills. A year later 69 healthychildren suddenly fell paralytically ill inMassachusetts. They lived in a town with

two cups of it directly into the brains oftwo monkeys. The monkeys fell severelyill (as might have been predicted). Onedied and the other had its legs paralysed.The scientists then dissected the monkeysand found damage in their centraln e rvous tissues similar to that found inhuman cases of infantile paralysis.8

Today the World Health Organisation(WHO) still credits Landsteiner andPopper as having found the polioviruswith this experiment. Why it does so isinexplicable. The fluid they injected musthave contained much human cellulardebris, any toxins involved in the child’sillness, and probably several kinds ofviruses. So, it was no wonder the monkeysfell so desperately ill. Such a soup could inno way be considered an ‘isolate’ of thetiny organism we now call a virus. It wasalso strangely non-infectious for a so-called virus, for the monkeys were notparalysed when made to drink it or whenone of their limbs was injected with it, nordid they pass it on to other monkeys. Theexperiment, in fact, shed no light on whathad paralysed the monkeys, and for thatm a t t e r, the children.

Nevertheless, the following yearSimon Flexner and Paul Lewis of theillustrious Rockefeller Institute forMedical Research in the US ‘proved’ asimilarly made noxious soup was‘infectious’ by injecting it into the brainof one monkey. They then extractedsome fluid from its brain, injected this

During the first half of the 20th century infantile paralysiss u rged like a bush fire, moving from place to place, aff l i c t i n gl a rge numbers of children… in the industrialised We s t .

A shot in the d a r k

Polio is a devastating

disease; the pre f e rre d

method for fighting it is

vaccination. Yet there is

a mass of historic

evidence that suggests it

is not caused by a viru s

but by industrial and

agricultural pollution

Polio: arep e s t i c i d e sto blame?Endocrinologist Mort o nBiskind said thes p read of polio afterWWII was caused bythe ‘most intensivecampaign of masspoisoning in humanh i s t o ry’ – the sprayingof some 3.1 billionpounds of pesticides

The first epidemic of poliomyelitis in at ropical nation was contemporaneous withthe introduction of the pesticide DDT in thatc o u n t ry. To w a rds the end of WWII, USm i l i t a ry camps in the Philippines started tobe sprayed daily with DDT in order to killf l i e s .2 9 Writing in The Journal of theAmerican Medical Association two yearsafter the war, Albert Sabin re p o rted thatpoliomyelitis became, after conflict, themajor cause of death among the tro o p sstationed at these camps. And yetunsprayed neighbouring populations werenot affected by the disease.3 0 At the end ofthe war, the US military ’s stocks of DDTw e re sold onto the public – despite thegravest warnings from establishmentscientists.

In 1944, the US federal research centrethe National Institutes of Health reportedthat DDT damaged the same part of thespinal cord (the anterior horn cells) thatis damaged in infantile paralysis.Endocrinologist Dr Morton Biskind further

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 Bro a d s t a i r s

o u t b reak was fairly typical. It affected institutions such as board i n g

schools that had little contact with each other, but which took milk

f rom a common sourc e .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

p rolong its ‘shelf life’ may also have been responsible. (In 1897 T h e

Australian Medical Gazette re p o rted that formaldehyde in milk had

caused several cases of paralysis.) 7

continued page 39

3 8 T H E E C O L O G I S T M A Y 2 0 0 4

Middle East, Asia and Africa. In Tu r k e ythey found people who called infantileparalysis ‘the American disease’. Thedoctors were surprised: immunity to thevirus presumably meant that it hadinfected the population. So, how come itcaused no epidemics in these countries?

H o w e v e r, the scientists racing to find avaccine were so convinced that a virus wasto blame that they effectively disregardedany evidence to thec o n t r a ry. Amongthese it seems wasJonas Salk. In 1947he found among thedebris and toxins of‘viral isolates’ frommonkey brainexperiments what hebelieved to be thepoliovirus. Althoughhe had not provedthat this could causepolio in humans, hehoped he could useit to make a vaccine.But the highly respected bacteriologistClaus Jungeblut thought otherwise. Heo b s e rved that such ‘viral isolates’ did notcreate in monkeys the same disease asfound in human cases of infantilep a r a l y s i s .1 3 He concluded: ‘The highlyspecialised … virus which has beenmaintained in the past by intra-cerebralpassage in rhesus monkeys is more likely al a b o r a t o ry a rt e f a c t than the agent whichcauses the natural disease in man’. In otherwords, the ‘virus’ found by the vaccinescientists probably did not exist in thewild but was a product of theire x p e r i m e n t s .1 4 If he were right, theconsequences were vast. It could meanthat the ‘isolates’ used by Salk to make avaccine injected into over a hundredmillion people, had no relationship to thehuman disease it was supposed to counter.

Then, in 1948 Gilbert Dalldorf andGrace Sickles of the New Yo r kDepartment of Health triumphantlyclaimed that they had found the virus inthe excrement of paralysed children.

into another monkey, and so on througha series of monkeys, paralysing all ofthem in the process. Flexner and Lewisreported: ‘We failed utterly to discoverbacteria… that could account for thedisease [paralysis]… The infecting agentof epidemic poliomyelitis [probably]belongs to the class of the minute andfilterable viruses that have not thus farbeen demonstrated with certainty underthe microscope.’9 In other words, we’veinjected a cocktail of viruses, cellulardebris and DNA into a series of monkeys,and we believe that a virus, not yetidentified within this noxious cocktail, isresponsible! The procedure of Flexnerand Lewis was just as dubious as theirconclusion: they took no account of thecontaminants in their mashed-up soup;they presumed what happened inmonkeys would be replicated in humans;and surprisingly, given the evidencearound at the time, they didn’t injectsamples of cyanide or lead into the brainsof monkeys to see if they also causedparalysis. In 1910 neonatologist LEmmett Holt reported: ‘Even five yearsago if anyone had suggested that thedisease under discussion was an

infectious or contagious one, it wouldhave been looked upon as a joke.’ 1 0

Nevertheless, this crude scienceinspired a 40-year hunt for the infantileparalysis virus. All kinds of biologicalmaterials – spinal cord, brain, faecalm a t t e r, even flies – were ground up andinjected into monkeys’ brains to try toinduce paralysis.1 1

Meanwhile, US president FranklinD Roosevelt, himself a victim ofinfantile paralysis, set up in

1938 the National Foundation forInfantile Paralysis (NFIP). The NFIPpromptly decided that there was no curefor those already suffering from thedisease. It would also refuse to examinereports of successful treatment involvingantidotes against toxins. It insteadfocused on raising money for vacciner e s e a rch by releasing stories about thehorrors of infantile paralysis. The worstcases were indeed frightening: somevictims had to be placed in ‘iron lungs’ tohelp them breathe.

This advertising drive wassensationally successful, effective both inraising money and in spreading fear of

They had spun a sample to remove largerparticles, diluted it and injected it intothe brains of mice. The animalsunsurprisingly became dangerously illand paralysed.1 5

The news of Dalldorf and Sickles’experiment was nevertheless welcomedby the vaccine scientists. Up to now theyhad struggled to find the poliovirus inhuman spinal tissue. It would now be

vastly easier tocollect thepoliovirus theybelieved they hadidentified fromhuman excrementthan from humanspinal tissue. Butwhy was it so hardto find it in then e rve cells in thespinal column thatit supposedlydamaged – that iswhere 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 presenteg the Coxsackie virus. This news wasgrimly received. Their planned poliovaccine would not work against theCoxsackie. There was ‘some feeling ofdismay … [this] added one more problemto the nebulous conditions surroundingpoliomyelitis… the more we learn aboutpoliomyelitis, the less we know,’ wroteAL Hoynel in the journal The MedicalClinics of North America. A L a n c e t e d i t o r i a lin the same year said this discoverybrought ‘a crop of new snags’ todeveloping a vaccine.

Soon they discovered that it waspossible for many different viruses to bepresent in these damaged nerve cells. Iftoxins caused the disease, this would beeasy to explain. Many kinds of viruses areattracted to toxin-damaged cells. Morebad news for the polio vaccine scientists.The public expected them to deliver

‘Especially those who ate the most fresh fruit’

The use of lead arsenate to spray orc h a rds was widespread in 1930s

America. Orc h a rds were sprayed 10 or more times a year. Spraying

o c c u rred in summer, the season when children went down with

infantile paralysis. Many re s e a rchers associated outbreaks of the

condition with fruit supplies. The UK threatened to stop imports of US

apples unless the

pesticide level was

cut. Tobacco and

other crops were also

sprayed. Today the

soil in heavily sprayed

a reas remains so

polluted that it is a

major problem to

housing developers:

in many places the

soil has to be

completely re m o v e d .

described in 1949 how DDT caused‘lesions in the spinal cord resemblingthose in human polio in animals’. Hecommented: ‘Despite the fact that DDT isa highly lethal poison for all species ofanimals, the myth has become prevalentamong the general population that it issafe for man in virtually any quantity. Notonly is it used in households withreckless abandon so that sprays andaerosols are inhaled, the solutions arepermitted to contaminate skin, beddingand other textiles.’ The same year inGermany, Daniel Dresden found that acuteDDT poisoning produced ‘degeneration inthe central nervous system’ that seemedidentical to that reported in severe casesof infantile paralysis.3 1

Yet DDT was used to replace leadarsenate as a pesticide in fruit farmingand with which to wash dairy cows. Heavylevels of DDT were soon reported in milksupplies. The organochlorine pesticideDDE (which is several times moredangerous than DDT) was also widely usedin the US. Both were known to penetratethe blood-brain barrier that protects thehuman brain from viral invasion.Housewives were actually advised tospray DDT to stop infantile paralysis.Children’s bedrooms had wallpaper pre-soaked in DDT. Epidemics of infantileparalysis started to occur every year.

By 1952 the number of cases ofinfantile paralysis was three times higherthan the figure for 1940.

Biskind treated over 200 patientsaffected with such neurologicaldisorders. He found that many of thesepatients recovered when foodscontaminated with pesticides wereremoved from their diets; this applied

the poliovirus, especially among parents.But the authorities had little immediatehelp for them. They simply advised themto keep their children clean, away fromplaces where infections could be passedon, such as public swimming pools, andto kill flies. The zeal of the parents wasencouraged by advertisements showinggiant flies attacking children. While thepoorer families responded by swattingflies and using more soap and water, themore affluent tried to turn their homesinto sterile zones by constantly sprayingthem with insecticides. But these spraysproved useless. And what was even morep e rculiar was that doctors reported thedisease was affecting mostly the childrenfrom better-off families – especially thosewho ate the most fresh fruit. People thusstarted to call the disease ‘the middle-class plague’. All this was so utterlyinexplicable that parents were left feelinghelpless and despairing.

By the end of the 1930s thevaccine scientists had testedvarious ‘viral isolates’ from

infected monkey brains, but when theseisolates were fed orally to monkeys theanimals did not fall ill. This was mostpuzzling. The monkeys producedantibodies afterwards, so some virus musthave harmlessly infected them. The onlyway the scientists found they couldcreate a version of infantile paralysis inthe monkeys was by injecting largequantities of the ‘virus’ suspensionsdirectly into their brains.

In 1941 the work of the virus huntersreceived a potentially fatal setback. DrJohn Toomey reported in The Journal ofP e d i a t r i c s that it was not passed betweenindividuals ‘no matter how intimatelyexposed.’ 1 2 If the disease was non-infective, then it could not be caused by avirus and thus a vaccine would not work.

Other holes started to appear in thevirus theory. During WWII army doctorsfound widespread immunity to thesuspected poliovirus, and no evidence ofinfantile paralysis epidemics, in the

Polio: are pesticides to blame? (cont.)

‘The great expectation for DDT have been re a l i z e d .During 1946 exhaustive tests have shown that whenp roperly used… DDT is a benefactor of all humanity’

T I M E MAGAZINE, JUNE 1 9 4 7

continued page 41

The case against the polio viru s

1 It had been around humans

for thousands of years and in

n a t u re only re p roduces in human

t h roats or guts. Such viruses are

n o rmally 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

s t ronger resistance to illness.

2 If it were the dangero u s

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 viro l o g y. These are

called the Koch Postulates. They

why viruses might be found ondamaged motor neuron cells incases of infantile paralysis. Heposited that the body itself mightactivate or produce these viru s e s ,p e rhaps when under threat or toclean up cellular damage. While‘the fundamental cause of humanpoliomyelitis appears to be apoison or toxin’, Scobey said, ‘thev i rus is synthesised or activatedwithin the human body as a re s u l tof the poisoning’. He suggestedthat the virus might re m a i n‘ d o rmant’ within cells untilsomething activates it. We nowknow that the poliovirus can bed o rmant. It is also widely knownthat toxic-damaged tissuesattract viruses. One of thes t a n d a rd tests for toxins, theAmes Assay, utilises the fact thatif viruses mutate and multiply inthe presence of a certain amountof a chemical then that amount isd a n g e rously toxic. Scobey wenton to list anti-toxins that hadp roved effective in curing polio,citing 11 scientific papers writtenbetween 1936 and 1949.2 8

set up the rules for declaring a

disease to be caused by a viru s .

The 1st Postulate states that the

v i rus 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.2 5

4 It widely infects childre n

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

p a rents. 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

C o n t rol and Prevention (CDC) has

published a theory to explain this

e x t r a o rd i n a ry behaviour. The

c h i l d ren of US middle-class

p a rents were uniquely liable to fall

ill with infantile paralysis because

in their infancy parents kept them

away from the dirt in which the

v i rus lives. This meant these

c h i l d ren were not infected when it

was safest – while protected by

their mothers’ milk. Once again,

this theory contradicted every t h i n g

known about infectious illness:

good hygiene nearly always stops

epidemics; with infantile paralysis,

the CDC argued, good hygiene was

the cause.2 6

F u rt h e rm o re, the CDC’s theory

was based on the assumption that

working-class children are uniquely

exposed to ord i n a ry dirt. Yet sure l y

middle-class children also go out

into the garden? The theory was

also conceived without checking

medical re p o rts on the early

epidemics of infantile paralysis.

R e f e rring to a 1908 epidemic in

vaccines that would stop the epidemics,but it was now evident that their poliovaccines would, at the very best, onlyprevent some cases, the ones with theirpoliovirus present.

And yet despite all the doubts andc o n t r a ry findings, the vaccine researc hcontinued. In 1949 John Enders andThomas Weller discovered how to growthe poliovirus in cell cultures, rather thanonly in the brains of living animals.1 6 T h i smade possible the commercial productionof virus-based vaccines. Then it wasdiscovered how to grow their polioviruson cheap monkey kidney and testiclec e l l s .1 7 Monkeys soon became the

‘growing bed’ for the virus. They wouldbe trapped, imported and slaughtered bythe hundreds of thousands to make thepolio vaccines, and are still caught in thewild today for the purpose of testing theUK vaccine.

By 1954 Salk had his polio vaccineready for testing. (He confessed to‘sacrificing’ some 17,000 monkeys

in the process of developing it) He basedthe vaccine on his theory that childrenwould gain immunity to living poliovirusif dead poliovirus were injected into them.He hoped our sensitive immune systemwould react by creating antibodies to these

particularly to milk products. Biskindfound high concentrations of DDT inbutter purchased in New York. In 1949 hewrote: ‘Though it was originally observedin 1945 that DDT is absorbed through theskin, accumulates in the body fat andappears in the milk of animals, it hasrecently become almost universal p r a c t i c eto spray cattle with DDT… Although younganimals are much more susceptible to thee ffects of DDT than adults, so far as theavailable literature is concerned, it doesnot appear that the effects of suchconcentrations on infants and childre nhave even been considere d . ’ 3 2

Despite the official complacency aboutsubstances like DDT and DDE, a fewdoctors did consider the effects of toxins.Some re p o rted successfully tre a t i n gparalysed patients with dimerc a p rol, ananti-toxin that is still used in hospitalssince it ‘binds’ heavy metal poisons suchas arsenic and lead and renders them non-toxic. In 1951 Dr Irwin Eskwith re p o rt e dsuccessfully using dimerc a p rol to cure achild suffering from bulbar paralysis, themost severe form of infantile paralysis.3 3

A medical journal also re p o rted that 17acute cases of polio were cured aftert reatment with very large doses of anotheranti-toxin – ascorbic acid.3 4

A year earlier investigators from the USFood and Drug Administration (FDA) hadannounced: ‘The finding of [liver] cellalteration at dietary levels as low as fiveparts per million of DDT, and theconsiderable storage of the chemical [inbody fats]… makes it extremely likelythat the potential hazard of DDT has beenunderestimated.’ Polio epidemics hadbeen becoming more and more severefrom 1945 onwards. Biskind reported thatthis was due to the ‘most intensivecampaign of mass poisoning in knownhuman history’, the spraying of some 3.1billion pounds of pesticides.3 5

In a 1953 paper published in theAmerican Journal of Digestive DiseasesBiskind said: ‘It was known by 1945 thatDDT is stored in the body fat of mammalsand appears in [their] milk… Yet, far fromadmitting a causal relationship [betweenDDT and polio] so obvious that in anyother field of biology it would be instantlyaccepted, virtually the entire apparatusof communication, lay and scientific

Polio: are pesticides to blame? (cont.)

viral corpses that would also protect usagainst living wild poliovirus. To kill thevirus he poisoned it with formaldehydebefore putting it into his vaccine.

In 1954 he tested this concoction onmore than 400,000 US children. It wasreported afterwards that ‘only’ 112 of thechildren who received three jabs of hisvaccine contracted polio within the nextfew months. Salk judged his experimenta success.1 8 But his safety-test resultsomitted all cases of children who wereparalysed after one or two doses of thevaccine – or within two weeks of takingthe third dose. These were counted ascases of polio in the non-vaccinated

control groupand thus in my view castdoubt on the validity of his results, for itmade it impossible to tell just whatimpact his vaccine had had. It could havebeen that many of the cases of polio inthe control group were caused by onedose of his vaccine – there was nothingin the published accounts I have seen tosay 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 morethan 60 per cent could have been immunea l r e a d y, at least according to the theory ofthe US federal agency the Centers forDisease Control and Prevention (CDC)

The polio virus necessary for the vaccine was grown on the kidneys of wild-caught monkeys.

4 0 T H E E C O L O G I S T M A Y 2 0 0 4

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 re a l i t y, they

w e re the ones who fell ill.

6 If guilty of causing paralysis, it

would have to travel from the gut

t h rough the formidable blood-brain

b a rrier that protects our brains and

spinal cords. We still have not

o b s e rved it doing this, despite

many decades of intense re s e a rch.

7 It is rarely found in human

blood – the easiest route from the

gut to the blood-brain barr i e r. Ye t

this is where Jonas Salk’s vaccine

was supposed to intercept it.

8 It has never been observ e d

re p roducing in victims’ motor

n e u rone cells.2 7

AN ALT E R N ATIVE PROPOSITION

Poliomyelitis re s e a rcher Dr RalphScobey suggested in 1954 a re a s o n

When it was eventually photographed using an electron microscope, the poliovirus was shown to be tiny: an elegant sphere madeup of triangular equal-sized sides, and in all just 25 millionths of a millimetre across. Is this ‘poliovirus’ the cause of infantileparalysis / polio? Or is it an ancient and harmless companion of the human race? All the evidence suggestes the latter:

continued page 43

cases were reported, some of them afterinoculation with other brands.’ 1 9

Within two weeks of the launch thenumber of cases of polio in vaccinatedchildren had nearly reached 200. Thiscreated near panic in the White House.President Eisenhower had publiclyendorsed the vaccine at its launch, so hesent the US health secretary OvetaHobby to make it very plain to theSurgeon General that the presidentneeded to be spared the embarrassmentof further such cases.

On 8 May 1955 the Surgeon Generalsuspended the entire US production ofthe vaccine. After hurried meetingsbetween Salk, manufacturers and thesurgeon general, distribution of thevaccine was resumed five days later, withnew regulations in place to ensure betterstandards in the vaccine laboratories.The general consensus was that thesecases had been caused by viruses in thevaccine that had survived theformaldehyde, despite evidence that

repeated injections cancause paralysis.

However, despite

alike, has been devoted to denying,concealing, suppressing, distorting andattempts to convert into its opposite theoverwhelming evidence. Libel, slanderand economic boycott have not beenoverlooked in this campaign.’ 3 6

US farmers had been officiallyrecommended to stop washing cattle withDDT in 1949, but this advice was notenforced and was mostly ignored. In 1950supplies of US milk were found to containup to twice the amount of DDT that wasneeded to produce severe illness inhumans. Biskind and fellow poliomyelitisresearcher Ralph Scobey were invited totestify to Congress in 1950 and in 1951,respectively.3 7 They drew up a formidablecase for banning DDT, citing the work ofmany scientists. In 1951 the US PublicHealth Service said: ‘DDT is a delayed-action poison. Due to the fact that itaccumulates in the body tissues,especially in females, the repeatedinhalation or ingestion of DDT constitutesa distinct health hazard. The deleteriouseffects are manifested principally in theliver, spleen, kidneys and spinal cord…DDT is excreted in the milk of cows and ofnursing mothers.’

Effective action was slow to be taken,however: the health establishment was

in total denial as far as pesticide effects onhumans were concerned. Precautions wereput in place too slowly and too late to stopthe greatest of all the infantile paralysisepidemics – that of 1952, when some57,700 cases were re p o rted across the US,of which a third had paralytic symptoms.

By the end of the 1952 epidemic therewas a vast amount of evidence to suggestthat infantile paralysis was not caused bya virus:

1 Farm and domestic animals wereparalysed at the same time as children.Chickens that had become lame werefound to have suffered motor neuronedamage. The poliovirus only infectedhumans and thus could not have causedthe animals’ paralysis. Exposure topoisons, on the other hand, can damagemany different species at the same time.

2 Most cases of paralysis were incurredwithin 48 hours of each other. That is not

Polio: are pesticides to blame? (cont.)these new regulations, four months latermore than 2,000 cases of infantileparalysis were recorded in Boston,despite the vaccination of 130,000children in the city. The previous year ithad seen only 273 cases. The number ofcases doubled invaccinated New YorkState andConnecticut, andtripled in Vermont.They increased byfive times in bothRhode Island andWisconsin. Manywere paralysed inthe injected arm.

It seemed thatthe vaccine wouldsoon be totallydiscredited. So, toprotect thePresident, Salk, thevaccinemanufacturers andthemselves from thehumiliation of anunmitigated failure,the US health authorities had todramatically slash the incidence ofpoliomyelitis. They managed this bysimply changing the way they recordedthe incidents of poliomyelitis. It workedlike this:

that working-class children were alreadyimmune as a result of exposure to the virusin dirt. It is not known if Salk ever checkedto see if children were already immunebefore he vaccinated them, but HilaryKoprowski reported in 1957 that theinhabitants of the Congo were 85 per centimmune before they ever saw a dose ofpolio vaccine. (Amazingly this didn’t stopKoprowski. He went on to uselesslyadminister to them hundreds of thousandsof doses of his experimental vaccine.)

The Salk vaccine could have beenderailed if a 1954 report by Dr BerniceE d d y, the scientist in charge of the USgovernment safety-testing lab, had beentaken seriously. Eddy stated that whenshe tested the Salk vaccine it causedsevere paralysis in monkeys. Shephotographed the diseased monkeys,took these photos to her boss – and wasreprimanded as an alarmist. She was notsure what it was in the vaccine thatcaused the paralysis: was it a virus,cellular debris or a toxin? Something

quite deadly was clearly present. (Oneyear later, after her warnings proved true,she was stopped from working on polio.)

On April 12 1955, Salk’s polio vaccinewas pronounced totally safe and effectivein providing complete protection againstpoliomyelitis (infantile paralysis), when itwas launched by the NationalFoundation for Infantile Paralysis beforean invited audience of 500 doctors and200 journalists. The launch ceremonywas relayed by closed-circuit television tosome 54,000 doctors in cities throughoutthe US and Canada. Salk wasimmediately awarded a CongressionalMedal by US president DwightE i s e n h o w e r. Church bells were rung incelebration of Salk’s victory. In T h e

Manchester Guard i a n, Alistair Cookewrote: ‘Nothing short of the overthrow ofthe Communist regime in the SovietUnion could bring such rejoicing to thehearts and homes in America as thehistoric announcement last Tuesday thatthe 166-year war against poliomyelitis isalmost certainly at an end.’

Medical Fraud

The triumph following the launchof the Salk vaccine was short-lived. The medical historian Dr M

Beddow Baily recorded what happenednext: ‘Only 13 days after the vaccine hadbeen acclaimed by the whole of the USpress and radio as one of the greatestmedical discoveries of the century, andtwo days after the British ministry ofhealth had announced it would go rightahead with the manufacture of thevaccine, came the first news of disaster.Children inoculated with one brand ofthe vaccine had developed poliomyelitis.In the following days more and more

The first news of disaster came only 13 days afterSalk was awarded a Congressional Medal in 1955with his vaccine being acclaimed as one of thegreatest medical discoveries of the century.

Prior to 1956, the authorities recordeda patient as having paralytic polio(infantile paralysis) if they suffered fromparalytic symptoms for 24 hours. After1956 patients had to have these paralyticsymptoms for at least 60 days to be

counted as havingpolio. As manypeople recoveredwithin 60 days, thismeasure alonedramatically cut theofficial number ofcases. This ‘drop’ inpolio cases waspublicly credited tothe vaccine.Furthermore, allcases of poliooccurring within 30days of vaccination(such as the first 200cases that had soalarmed the WhiteHouse) were infuture not to beblamed on thevaccine but to be

recorded as ‘pre-existing’.But Salk continued to worr y. Despite

its regulatory and statistical ‘success’, thereputation of his vaccine wasplummeting. In June 1955 the Britishdoctors’ union the Medical Practitioners’

In 1955 Salk’s polio vaccine was pronounced totallysafe and effective in providing complete protection

against poliomyelitis

Vaccine Paralysis

1 Muscles can be poisoned and paralysed by being re p e a t e d l y

injected with vaccines or antibiotics; this is now called ‘pro v o c a t i o n

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 re p o rted: ‘Clinically, the cases associated

with recent immunisations were indistinguishable from the acute

cases of paralytic poliomyelitis.’ 2 0 By 1955 US children were re c e i v i n g

t h ree 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.

4 2 T H E E C O L O G I S T M A Y 2 0 0 4 continued page 45

Union wrote:‘Thesemisfortuneswould be almostendurable if awhole new generation were to berendered permanently immune to thedisease. In fact, there is no evidence thatany lasting immunity is achieved.’ 2 1

The following month Canadasuspended its distribution of Salk’svaccine. By November all Europeancountries had suspended distributionplans, apart from Denmark. By January1957 17 US states had stopped distributingthe vaccine. The same year The New Yo r kTi m e s reported that nearly 50 per cent ofcases of infantile paralysis in childrenbetween the ages of five and 14 hadoccurred after vaccination.

So, more regulatory and statisticalchanges were needed in order to give thepolio vaccine the appearance of atriumph of modern medicine. Whatbetter way to achieve this than toreclassify all the cases of polio intonumerous other diseases resulting in amassive reduction in polio cases, and a

host of other diseases to attract funding.And this is exactly what they did. Prior to1958 the definition of infantile paralysis(polio) included cases in which paralysiswas minimal: perhaps manifesting itselfas a very stiff neck, often accompaniedby widespread pain. Polio also includedcases of ‘meningitis’, or of inflammationof the membrane that protects the brainand spinal neurons. The CDC describessuch cases as ‘serious but rarely fatal’.2 2

Prior to 1958 these cases werescientifically referred to as ‘non-paralyticpoliomyelitis’, or polio for short.H e n c e f o rward, they would be reclassified.The Los Angeles County healthauthorities stated: ‘Most cases reportedprior to July 1 1958 of non-paralyticpoliomyelitis are now reported as viral oraseptic meningitis.’ The incidence ofmeningitis soared as official polio casesdeclined, as the following table (compiledfrom national surveillance reports)shows.

Non-paralytic Asepticpolio cases 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 usedtoday. Last year the US National Centerfor Infectious Diseases reported no casesof poliomyelitis but 30,000 to 50,000cases of aseptic meningitis requiringhospitalisation. There are probablyseveral times this number of incidents ofaseptic meningitis that did not requirehospitalisation, but statistics are nolonger kept for such cases.

Then another scam was enacted tomassage down the poliomyelitis figures. Ittook advantage of the 1951 discovery thatdifferent viruses could be present in cases

of infantile paralysis. Prior to 1958 thisdid not matter. A doctor diagnosed aperson with polio by taking note of theirevident symptoms. They did notinvestigate to see if the poliovirus werepresent. In 1958 a new regulation was putin place requiring doctors to only registera patient as having polio if the polioviruswere present, something that was verydifficult to establish for sure. For a start, itwas impossible to tell by looking atsymptoms. The Textbook of Child Neuro l o g yreported: ‘Coxsackie virus and echovirusescan cause paralytic syndromes that areclinically indistinguishable from paralyticpoliomyelitis.’ This new requirement fordoctors caused a vast drop in the numberof cases registered as poliomyelitis – adrop that ever since has been creditedsolely to the vaccine.

So, when patients diagnosed ashaving polio in a 1958 epidemic inDetroit were re-tested as required by this

the pattern for infectious outbreaks,which start slowly, grow faster as theinfection spreads and then diminish asimmunity develops. It is the pattern of amass poisoning event.

3 Parents reported that some childrenfell ill immediately after eating fresh fruitFruit was sprayed heavily with leadarsenate at the time.

4 The illness was relieved by theadministration of antidotes for chemicalpoisoning, and chemicals associated withpoisoning appeared in the diseased tissuesof the victims of paralytic polio – includingo e s t rogenic chemicals now widelyassociated with environmental poisoning.

5 The spread of poliomyelitis was notaffected by the closure of schools, as itshould have been if the disease wasinfectious. Nor did close contact withparalysed children spread paralysis. Yetthe virus presumed to cause the illnesswas highly infectious, as was shown bythe widespread presence of antibodies forit among healthy individuals.

6 There was little or no correlationbetween the prevalence of polioantibodies in the population and theincidence of paralytic polio. In factpatients deemed to be recovering fromparalytic polio were found to ‘becompletely lacking’ in polio antibodies.3 8

7 And the most virulent viral epidemicsoccur when viruses are newly introducedinto populations. The poliovirus had beenpresent long before the epidemicsstarted. The use of chemical pesticides,in contrast, began just before theepidemics started.

Slowly, the US authorities began to act.Following the FDA secured legislativerestrictions on the use of pesticides in19543 9 and 19564 0, the incidence ofinfantile paralysis in the US plummetedimmediately. By the time Jonas Salk’spolio vaccine was publicly released in1955, the level of infantile paralysis inthe US was already below a half of what ithad been in 1952. The figures for the UKwere even more dramatic: the incidenceof infantile paralysis fell by more than 82per cent between 1950 and the first massadministration of the vaccine in 1957.

Polio: are pesticides to blame? (cont.)

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

f rom one cell to another – perhaps so as to resolve genetic pro b l e m s

or to deal with toxins. Cells can do this by turning transposons into

messengers that carry genetic code from cell to cell. Tr a v e l l i n g

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 ‘re p roduce’. 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

v i rus, 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.

By the time Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine was introduced inAmerica in 1955, the level of infantile paralysis in thecountry was already a third of what it had been in 1952,due to legislative restrictions on the use of pesticides.

paralysis cases had sharply increasedafter the introduction of Salk’s vaccine.Without the Coxsackie and asepticmeningitis reclassifications, for example,the number of reported cases of paralyticpolio would have doubled from 2,500 in1957 to 5,000 in 1959. 2 3

This deliberate fraud did not goentirely unnoticed, however. Dr BernardGreenberg, the then head of theDepartment of Biostatistics at theUniversity of North Carolina, testified ata 1962 Congressional hearing thatinfantile paralysis cases had increasedafter the introduction of the vaccine by50 per cent from 1957 to 1958, and by80 per cent from 1958 to 1959. Heconcluded that US health officials hadmanipulated the statistics to give entirelythe opposite impression. 2 4

4 4 T H E E C O L O G I S T M A Y 2 0 0 4

new rule, 49 per cent were found to haveno poliovirus. They had to be reclassifiedas having ‘non-poliomyelitis acuteflaccid paralysis’ even though they weresuffering from symptoms identical topoliomyelitis with the same paralysisand the same pain. Other polio caseswere reclassified as ‘Guillian-Barrésyndrome’, which some researchers nowthink is what crippled Roosevelt. Yetmore cases are now referred to as ‘Hand,Foot and Mouth Disease’, which can alsocause paralysis. And last year theCoxsackie virus was found in cases ofChronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS), whichsometimes shows polio-like symptoms ofmuscle damage; in the past CFS mighthave been classified as a form of polio.

If this process of reclassification hadnot occurred, it would have beenimpossible to hide the fact that infantile

The disease that struck down somany in the 20th centuryepidemics was then known as

infantile paralysis, or poliomyelitis. It wasthis disease the polio vaccines wereintended to eliminate. But today infantileparalysis is renamed as Acute FlaccidParalysis (AFP). How could the WHO beclaiming to have nearly eliminated thisdisease when, by its own figures,epidemics of AFP are not ending but

rapidly getting worse. Take the WHO’s figures for the east

Asian/Pacific region as an example. Theyreveal that the incidence of AFP went upbetween 1994 and 1998 by 50 per centin China, 400 per cent in Malaysia, and1,500 per cent in the Pacific islands. Butother than providing these statistics,WHO pays little attention to any ofthese cases in which the poliovirus isabsent – meaning nearly all of them.

These cases are left without a cure –andeven without a vaccine! They becomeeffectively a hidden epidemic.

WHO makes even bolder claims forEurope and the Americas. It states thatthey are now free of both polio and AFP.On closer inspection, WHO’s figures donot bear much scrutiny. It declares thatthere is ‘no data’ for the number of casesof AFP in the UK and the US. It theninterprets ‘no data’ as if it means ‘zero’.4 1

But the US government’s Centres forDisease Control (CDC) does not agreeThe CDC records that many thousandsof cases of AFP occur in the US everyyear. It reports that AFP can have manycauses. For example, it says that Guillain-Barré disease causes 17 cases of AFP per100,000 of the US population. Thattranslates into around 50,000 casesannually. The CDC also says that everyyear there are some 30,000 to 50,000cases of aseptic meningitis seriousenough to require hospitalisation. BothGuillain-Barré disease and asepticmeningitis were diagnosed as polioduring the US epidemics prior to 1957. Ifyou use the pre-1957 definition, thenthere are many more cases ofpoliomyelitis occurring in the US today,than there were in 1952 – at the heightof the US polio epidemics.

To this tally of ‘Acute FlaccidParalysis’ one could add the many morecases of AFP reported by the CDC asoccurring in an epidemic that has sweptacross the US over the past five years,and which is attributed to the ‘West Nile’virus (WNV). The CDC states that WNVcan cause a ‘polio-like’ paralysis. Manyscientists have been less ambiguous.They say WNV is clinicallyindistinguishable from poliomyelitis.4 2

A paper recently published by the BritishMedical Journal suggests WNV may be‘rapidly evolving to fill new ecologicalniches’.4 3 In 2003 there were 9,389 casesof this disease in the US, of which 2,773showed damage to the nervous systemand 246 were fatal. Some researchersthink WNV has links to pesticides andother pollutants. A legal action iscurrently underway in New York to stopthe aerial spraying of the city withMalathion, an organophosphatepesticide first used in the 1950s. The cityauthorities want to use it to kill themosquitoes it blames for WNV. Thelitigants maintain that the pesticide is

more likely to cause thedisease than prevent it.

How does WHOdistinguish the very fewcases of AFP it says arecaused by polio from other cases of AFP?It cannot do this easily – as there is nodistinguishing symptom. It insteadinstructs doctors to send two samples ofexcrement from AFP patients to one ofthe scores of laboratories it has set uparound the world. These inspect theexcrement for poliovirus. If it is present,then they register this as a case ofpoliomyelitis. If they don’t find thevirus, then it is registered as a case of‘Non-Poliomyelitis AFP’.4 4 But this WHOtest is in effect meaningless. Thepoliovirus is by definition a type ofenterovirus, which means a stomachbug. Its presence in excrement is thusnatural – and does not indicate that ithas damaged nerves.

WHO actively discourages doctorsfrom looking for the poliovirusthemselves in cases of AFP, because ‘the

virus is very hard to find’ and researchshows that ‘there was no relationshipbetween finding the virus and the courseof the disease’. It adds that presence ofthe virus in the central nervous system(CNS) ‘appeared to have no diagnosticsignificance.’ 4 5 And yet this is the veryreason given for the need to vaccinateagainst the poliovirus.

The Sabin polio vaccine has beenchosen by WHO to finally eradicatethe poliovirus. It hopes to achieve

this by inspecting the excrement fromevery case of AFP reported. Should it finda case in which the poliovirus is present,then the polio vaccine will beadministered on a national scale so as toeliminate the risk of its spreading. Thishas happened now so many times thatin countries like India children have

received up to 10 doses ofthe vaccine.

But this is the strangesttool for the WHO to chooseto eradicate the poliovirus

with. Sabin’s vaccine, unlike Salk’s ,contains living mutated poliovirus. Thiswill breed in the vaccinated. WHOrecommends this vaccine for thedeveloping world for this very reason, forthe vaccinated widely spread the virus, toinfect and immunise those who haverefused vaccination. WHO is thusstrangely choosing to spread a poliovirusin order to eliminate it!

WHO shows little concern overreplacing the natural poliovirus in theenvironment with an ‘unnatural’laboratory-made mutated poliovirus bredin monkey cells. This is astonishing,given that this synthetic virus does notremain stable, but continues to mutate.Poliovirus contains RNA – a type ofgenetic coding that allows rapidmutation – and the vaccine’s mutatedpoliovirus has acquired a reputation

The h i d d e ne p i d e m i c

The World Health Organisation (WHO) confidently

p redicts that polio epidemics are all but over and

that the poliovirus itself will become extinct by the

end of 2004. Who is it trying to fool and why?

The search for a virus and vaccinefor polio was based on a flawed

t h e o ry. This tragically distracted themedical establishment from the

e n v i ronmental science that mighthave cured a large number of

c h i l d ren – and which could still do so

4 6 T H E E C O L O G I S T M A Y 2 0 0 4 T H E E C O L O G I S T M A Y 2 0 0 4 4 7

among researchers for the speed withwhich it does this. The virus can alsoreside inside humans for more than 20years, making it practically impossible toexterminate. And what is more shocking,but not surprising given the nature ofviruses, it is now reappearing in moremutated forms in outbreaks on severalcontinents.4 6 The danger now is thatthese might now evolve to present athreat that the natural virus never did.

But why do we still have epidemics ofinfantile paralysis/AFP?Organochlorine and organophosphatepesticides are back in widespread use.They may be better regulated, but theirtoxins still accumulate in body fats untilthey reach dangerous levels. The level ofpesticide pollution on farmland inAmerica is now so bad that the USEnvironmental Protection Agency‘estimates that there are 10,000 to 20,000cases of physician-diagnosedpesticide poisonings’ everyyear among agriculturalworkers. The CDC reports thatapproximately one billionpounds of pesticides are nowused every year in the US. Theglobal market for pesticideswas estimated at $1,761 billionin 1989; it would surely bebigger today.

The fact is, the victory won againstpesticides in the early 1950s was veryshort-lived. In 1955, the very year thatSalk’s vaccine was launched,organophosphate pesticides wereintroduced into the US in partialreplacement for organochlorines likeDDT. The organophosphates wereperhaps less dangerous than theorganochlorines, but they were stillhighly neurotoxic.

It was only after the publication ofRachel Carson’s sensational book SilentSpring in 1962, telling how pesticideswere endangering the survival ofAmerica’s symbolic bald eagles, thatmore meaningful restrictions were puton organophosphates and the remainingorganochlorines. They were banned inthe US in 1972, but not for long. In 1983organophosphate pesticides werereintroduced.

During the ban, US pesticidemanufacturers simply shifted markets.They redirected most of their sales to the

cause of all paralytic epidemics.One hopeful sign of progress was a

recent report by the US NationalAcademy of Sciences, documenting howcurrent levels of food contamination byorganophosphates can cause ‘acutepoisoning in children’.4 8 Anotherground-breaking piece of recent researchfocused on treating individuals sufferingfrom paralysis up to 40 years afterbecoming ill with poliomyelitis. A groupof 17 individuals were placed into anenvironment from which most toxicsubstances had been removed, and weretreated with antidotes to toxins. ‘Long-term follow-up of the 14 improvedpatients showed general return ofwellbeing and renewed vigour,’ and‘eight became totally pain-free’. Theresearchers concluded that ‘post-poliosyndrome’ was due to an ‘overload ofenvironmental pollutants on woundedtarget organs’.4 9

The evidence thus stronglysuggests that the infantileparalysis (polio)

epidemics of the past wereman-made disasters causedprimarily by the gross overuseof very dangerous pesticides,and that these epidemics arecontinuing. The poliovirus,

along with other viruses, may play arole, but it seems it is a far smaller rolethan that given to it by the vaccineindustry. The weight of evidence alsostrongly suggests that the search for thisvirus, and for a vaccine, was and is basedon a flawed theory. This has tragicallydistracted the medical establishmentfrom the science that might have cured alarge number of children – and whichcould still do so.

The consequence of the campaign tospin the polio vaccine as a great successis not simply that the public has beendeceived. If toxins are the primary causeof this disease, then countless thousandsof paralysed children have never beentreated correctly. Many could have hadtheir pain removed. Many might havebeen able to walk again. This is not someabstract academic issue: it affects realpeople, enduring real suffering and realparalysis. This is a story of a hiddenepidemic. It is surely time to cast asidethe fog of doctrine and urgently considerwhat can be done to cure such people.

developing nations as infantile paralysisceased to be the ‘American disease’. Thefirst polio epidemic in Manila happenedin 1972. Today the WHO encouragesdeveloping nations to use cheap DDT tokill malaria-spreading mosquitoes, whileit organises vaccination campaigns inthe same countries to fight the polio thatDDT may cause. Effectively, the pesticidecompanies are now partners to the WHOin its war against viruses. It’s safer forthem to blame a virus for polio thanpesticides: viruses can’t be sued.

WHO is now raising over a billiondollars, not to cure those still sufferingfrom the original disease, not to look tosee if toxins caused the children’sparalysis, but solely as a matter of prideto try to win for the polio vaccine aseeming victory by eliminating apractically harmless virus.

It states on its website: ‘There is nocure for polio: its effects are irreversible.’

This is only so because public funds havebeen wasted on an ineffective andwrongly targeted vaccine that cannotcure a single case of AFP. This is nothingother than tragic for the thousands ofchildren involved.

And finally, why is the WHO ignoringthe possible role of pesticides, andsticking with its vaccination assault?Is it because in our increasinglyspecialised, non-holistic world, thevirologists involved with vaccines havenot been talking to the toxicologistsinvolved with chemicals? Despite thefact that there are literally hundreds ofpapers produced by the latterdocumenting how pesticides can harmour immune systems, dramatically lowerthe number of our vital illness-fighting‘T-cells’, and cause numerous otherdiseases as well as paralysis4 7, thisresearch unfortunately does not seem tobe filtering through to the vaccineindustry, which is still based on thetheory that viruses must be the principal

The evidence strongly suggeststhat the polio epidemics of the

past were man-made and causedprimarily by the gross overuse of

very dangerous pesticides

4 8 T H E E C O L O G I S T M A Y 2 0 0 4