Vancouver article, Kirby mention

[Guest guest]

Vaccines show sinister side

By pieta woolley

Publish Date: 23-Mar-2006

http://www.straight.com/Print_Page.cfm?id=16717

If two dozen once-jittery mice at UBC are telling the truth

postmortem, the world's governments may soon be facing one hell of a

lawsuit. New, so-far-unpublished research led by Vancouver

neuroscientist Shaw shows a link between the aluminum

hydroxide used in vaccines, and symptoms associated with

Parkinson's, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, or Lou Gehrig's

disease), and Alzheimer's.

Shaw is most surprised that the research for his paper hadn't been

done before. For 80 years, doctors have injected patients with

aluminum hydroxide, he said, an adjuvant that stimulates immune

response.

" This is suspicious, " he told the Georgia Straight in a phone

interview from his lab near Street and West 12th

Avenue. " Either this [link] is known by industry and it was never

made public, or industry was never made to do these studies by

Health Canada. I'm not sure which is scarier. "

Similar adjuvants are used in the following vaccines, according to

Shaw's paper: hepatitis A and B, and the Pentacel cocktail, which

vaccinates against diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, polio, and a type

of meningitis.

To test the link theory, Shaw and his four-scientist team from UBC

and Louisiana State University injected mice with the anthrax

vaccine developed for the first Gulf War. Because Gulf War Syndrome

looks a lot like ALS, Shaw explained, the neuroscientists had a

chance to isolate a possible cause. All deployed troops were

vaccinated with an aluminum hydroxide compound. Vaccinated troops

who were not deployed to the Gulf developed similar symptoms at a

similar rate, according to Shaw.

After 20 weeks studying the mice, the team found statistically

significant increases in anxiety (38 percent); memory deficits (41

times the errors as in the sample group); and an allergic skin

reaction (20 percent). Tissue samples after the mice

were " sacrificed " showed neurological cells were dying. Inside the

mice's brains, in a part that controls movement, 35 percent of the

cells were destroying themselves.

" No one in my lab wants to get vaccinated, " he said. " This totally

creeped us out. We weren't out there to poke holes in vaccines. But

all of a sudden, oh my God—we've got neuron death! "

At the end of the paper, Shaw warns that " whether the risk of

protection from a dreaded disease outweighs the risk of toxicity is

a question that demands our urgent attention. "

He's not the only one considering that.

The charge that there's a sinister side to magic bullets isn't new.

With his pen blazing, celebrity journalist F. Kennedy Jr.

popularized vaccine scepticism with his article arguing that mercury

in vaccines causes autism, which ran in the June 2005 Rolling Stone

and on-line at Salon.com. So did last year's vaccines-linked-to-

autism bestseller, Evidence of Harm by Kirby (St. 's

Press). But there's a potential public-health cost to all the

controversy, according to the B.C. Centre for Disease Control.

" Vaccines have been a victim of their own success, " spokesperson Ian

Roe told the Straight in a telephone interview from Ottawa. Diseases

such as polio, which killed his father-in-law, are almost eradicated

and therefore no longer serve as a warning to parents. But the

epidemic threat is still real. " If everyone decided to not get

vaccinated, we'd live in a very different world. "

Canada's last national immunization conference, in December 2004,

heard a report that vaccine coverage is sometimes low. For

diphtheria, the Public Health Agency of Canada found that just 75

percent of two-year-olds are immunized; the target is 99 percent.

For tetanus, just 66 percent of 17-year-olds are immunized, compared

to a target of 97 percent.

Dr. Gold, the former head of the infectious-disease division

at Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children, told the conference

that " we will never be without an anti-vaccine movement, " but " in

reality, there is no scientific evidence for these myths. "

Shaw acknowledges that there's a lot of pressure on parents to

vaccinate their children. " You're considered to be a really bad

parent if you don't vaccinate, " he said—and your child can't attend

public school. " But I don't think the safety of vaccines is

demarcated. How does a parent make a decision based on what's

available? You can't make an intelligent decision. "

Conservatively, he said, if one percent of vaccinated humans develop

ALS from vaccine adjuvants, it would still constitute a health

emergency.

It's possible, he said, that there are 10,000 studies that show

aluminum hydroxide is safe for injections. But he hasn't been able

to find any that look beyond the first few weeks of injection. If

anyone has a study that shows something different, he said,

please " put it on the table. That's how you do science. "

Neuroscience research is difficult, Shaw said, because symptoms can

take years to manifest, so it's hard to prove what caused the

symptoms.

" To me, that calls for better testing, not blind faith. "

He pointed out that W. Bush passed legislation that opens the

door for the USA to order a nationwide anthrax immunization

campaign, with the threat of bioterrorism.

Shaw's paper is currently undergoing a peer review.