Page 82 - Summer 2019 Journal

Most doctors of the time were unaware that DDT poisoning mimics the paralytic symptoms of polio.
By the early 1950s, articles began appearing in journals such as The Lancet19 and The Brit- ish Medical Journal20 that (however cautiously) admitted the role of injections. For example, a 1950 investigation to determine whether “cases of paralysis diagnosed as and indistinguishable from poliomyelitis were occurring in association with inoculation procedures” concluded that “there may have been present in the poliomy- elitis group cases which would not have been clinically diagnosed as poliomyelitis at all if their inoculation had not brought them into the paralytic group”20 [emphasis added]. More recent studies have reached much the same conclusion. A 1992 study in The Journal of Infectious Diseases (published by CDC authors, no less) showed that children who received DTP (diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis) injections were significantly more likely than matched control children to suffer paralytic poliomyelitis within the next thirty days.21
In 1995, CDC researchers published another study focusing on “vaccine-associated paralytic poliomyelitis” in The New England Journal of Medicine.22 The Romania-based study showed that children who received a single injection within a month of receiving the polio vaccine were eight times more likely to contract polio than children who had received no further injec- tions. The risk jumped twenty-seven-fold when children received up to nine injections within one month of polio vaccination, and, with ten or more injections, the likelihood of developing polio was one hundred and eighty-two times greater than expected. In the Romanian setting, 95 percent of the post-polio-vaccine injections were of antibiotics, while 4 percent of the injec- tions were DTP vaccine.22
INSECTICIDE-INDUCED PARALYSIS Diagnoses of what was thought to be “polio” also followed the 1939 discovery and introduction of the insecticide dichloro-diphe- nyl-trichloroethane (DDT), which earned Swiss scientist Dr. Paul Muller the Nobel Prize in 1948. Because DDT was presented as a solution to rid the public of insects falsely suspected of carrying a germ that spread polio, few initially realized that it actually was poisoning both chil-
dren and adults. For years, Americans hummed along to the catchy advertising jingle “DDT is good for me-e-e!” while children played behind trucks spraying plumes of DDT, not knowing the harm it caused. DDT was sprayed on beaches and playgrounds and was used in water to rinse out clothes, bedding and mattresses. Fearful par- ents went so far as to sprinkle it on sandwiches.7
Most doctors of the time were unaware that DDT poisoning mimics the paralytic symptoms of polio. In 1953, however, a Westport, Con- necticut physician, Morton S. Biskind, “had the composure to argue what he thought was the most obvious explanation for the polio epidemic: central nervous system diseases... such as polio are actually the physiological and symptomatic manifestations of the ongoing government- and industry-sponsored inundation of the world’s populace with central nervous system poisons.”23
Arsenicals—compounds containing arse- nic—are some of the oldest known causes of po- liomyelitis.7 Arsenic was considered to be “safe and effective” in the era prior to polio vaccine use, so much so that doctors prescribed arsenic in cases of lung problems such as asthma.
VIRAL AND OTHER CONTAMINANTS Miller describes how, in 1959, Bernice Eddy—a government scientist working in biologics at the National Institutes of Health (NIH)—discovered that polio vaccines being administered throughout the world contained an infectious agent capable of causing cancer.1 When Eddy attempted to report her findings and halt production of the contaminated polio vaccines, her government superiors barred her from publicly revealing the problem. Instead, they took away her lab and equipment, and she
was demoted.
It was not until the following year, 1960,
that two Merck scientists—Dr. Maurice Hil- leman and Dr. Benjamin Sweet—published findings concluding that all three types of Sa- bin’s live oral polio vaccine were contaminated with a “hitherto undetectable” monkey virus that they named simian virus 40 (SV40).24 The contamination was the direct result of using rhesus monkey kidney cells to make the vac- cines.25 Further research proved that SV40 was
80
Wise Traditions
SUMMER 2019