RE:Polio vaccines

[Guest guest]

If this has already been posted...I am sorry.....found this

interesting....as my mother tells me as a small child when given a

polio vaccine I was put into the hospital and almost didnt make it...

she blames all my troubles on that vaccine....

Polio Vaccines Given Decades Ago

d Carcinogenic Virus SV40

Snapshots of a government at work.

The U.S. Public Health Service, having learned in 1960 that millions

of

batches of polio vaccine were accidentally laced with a simian virus

(the

vaccine was grown on minced monkey kidney cells), quietly orders

manufacturers to rid the vaccine of the contaminant, called SV40. PHS

issues

neither a recall nor a public announcement. Contaminated stocks

already

distributed are used until 1963.

H.M. Ratner, a former public-health official in Oak Park, Illinois,

invites

Michele Carbone of nearby Loyola University School of Medicine over

for

coffee. In 1955, Dr. Ratner said, he had refused to administer the

Salk

polio vaccine. He felt it might not be safe. But he kept seven vials

in

his

basement refrigerator for 44 years, hoping that, one day, someone

would

be

interested in them. Someone was. Dr. Carbone was investigating the

possibility that SV40-contaminated polio vaccine was, decades after

being

given to about 98 million people, increasing the risk of three rare

cancers.

Last week, the Immunization Safety Review Committee of the Institute

of

Medicine, or IOM, met to consider evidence for and against that

unthinkable

hypothesis.

Amid dueling data, some facts are uncontested. An estimated two-thirds

of

the polio vaccines -- the oral Sabin and the injected Salk --

administered

from 1955 to 1963 contained SV40. Contaminated vaccine was also given

to

children and some adults in Australia, Canada, Denmark and Germany,

and

possibly Russia, Mexico and other countries.

SV40 is a known carcinogen. It targets the lung's mesothelial cells,

brain

cells, bone cells and blood cells, producing a protein that knocks out

two

human tumor-suppressor genes, p53 and Rb. There is no reliable test

for

SV40

exposure.

Government data show the incidence of SV40-linked cancers has risen. A

brain

cancer called ependymoma is up 25%. Bone malignancies are up 23%.

Mesothelioma (infamous for being triggered by asbestos) is up 90%. All

are

extremely rare: ependymoma, for example, strikes one in a million.

Are the rising cancer rates coincidence? In 1994, Loyola's Dr. Carbone

and

colleagues examined human mesotheliomas, and found SV40 genetic

sequences in

29 of 48 studied. SV40 has now been found in up to 80% of

mesotheliomas

in

the U.S. and Europe. Dozens of labs have found SV40 in bone and brain

cancers. Those, as I said, are rare. And Strickler of Albert

Einstein

College of Medicine in New York, a leading skeptic of the

vaccine-cancer

link, notes that many studies fail to find signs of SV40 in human

tumors.

In March, however, researchers led by Janet Butel of Baylor College of

Medicine reported that 42% of the non-Hodgkin lymphomas they analyzed

contained genetic sequences from SV40. And not just any SV40 sequence:

In

several of the tumors, it was precisely the genome of the SV40 in the

vials

of the 1955 polio vaccine that Dr. Ratner had held on to, waiting for

someone to care. Lab-grown SV40 harbors a variant genome. That isn't

to

say

that there might not be other sources, besides vaccine, of this strain

of

SV40, but to more and more scientists Dr. Butel's findings were the

smoking

gun.

With non-Hodgkin lymphoma, we're no longer talking about rare

malignancies.

This cancer has spiked 82% since 1973, epidemiologist Fisher of

the

University of Rochester told the IOM panel, with 287,000 new cases

reported

world-wide.

An analysis by Dr. Strickler shows no extra cancers among people

thought to

have been exposed to SV40-laced polio vaccine -- or, no extra increase

that

can't be explained by chance. Trouble is, with no reliable test for

SV40

exposure, it's impossible to be sure you're comparing an exposed with

an

unexposed group. You might be comparing populations exposed to SV40

with

populations also exposed. Of course there'd be no difference.

What are the ramifications of all this? Today's children are at no

risk

from

polio vaccine: It's now grown in SV40-free cells. And the overall

public-health risk from SV40-laced polio vaccine is ... well, one

scientist

told me it's " minimal. " Another says " unknown. " Tumors linked to SV40

are,

except for lymphomas, so rare that even a doubling of risk due to SV40

still

leaves you with good odds of never developing these cancers.

A wildcard, though, is the World Trade Center collapse, which released

asbestos into the air. Although SV40 alone rarely causes mesothelioma,

when

you add asbestos to the mix all bets are off. The IOM committee's

conclusions on SV40, polio vaccine and cancer are due out by the end

of

summer.

-- E-mail comments to sciencejournal@....

Updated July 18, 2002 5:08 p.m. EDT