Author:Janine Roberts

Part-2 is here: I could not open the link hence am copying it. - Jagannath.

A year earlier
investigators from the US Food and Drug
Administration (FDA) had announced: `The finding
of [liver] cell alteration at dietary levels as
low as five parts per million of DDT, and the
considerable storage of the chemical [in body
fats]... makes it extremely likely that the
potential hazard of DDT has been underestimated.'
Polio epidemics had been becoming more and more
severe from 1945 onwards. Biskind reported that
this was due to the `most intensive campaign of
mass poisoning in known human history', the
spraying of some 3.1 billion pounds of pesticides.(35)

In a 1953 paper published in the American Journal
of Digestive Diseases Biskind said: `It was known
by 1945 that DDT is stored in the body fat of
mammals and appears in [their] milk... Yet, far
from admitting a causal relationship [between DDT
and polio] so obvious that in any other field of
biology it would be instantly accepted, virtually
the entire apparatus of communication, lay and
scientific alike, has been devoted to denying,
concealing, suppressing, distorting and attempts
to convert into its opposite the overwhelming
evidence. Libel, slander and economic boycott
have not been overlooked in this campaign.' (36)
US farmers had been officially recommended to
stop washing cattle with DDT in 1949, but this
advice was not enforced and was mostly ignored.
In 1950 supplies of US milk were found to contain
up to twice the amount of DDT that was needed to
produce severe illness in humans. Biskind and
fellow poliomyelitis researcher Ralph Scobey were
invited to testify to Congress in 1950 and in
1951, respectively.(37) They drew up a formidable
case for banning DDT, citing the work of many
scientists. In 1951 the US Public Health Service
said: `DDT is a delayed-action poison. Due to the
fact that it accumulates in the body tissues,
especially in females, the repeated inhalation or
ingestion of DDT constitutes a distinct health
hazard. The deleterious effects are manifested
principally in the liver, spleen, kidneys and
spinal cord... DDT is excreted in the milk of cows and of nursing mothers.'


Effective action was slow to be taken, however:
the health establishment was in total denial as
far as pesticide effects on humans were
concerned. Precautions were put in place too
slowly and too late to stop the greatest of all
the infantile paralysis epidemics - that of 1952,
when some 57,700 cases were reported across the
US, of which a third had paralytic symptoms..

By the end of the 1952 epidemic there was a vast
amount of evidence to suggest that infantile
paralysis was not caused by a virus:

1 Farm and domestic animals were paralysed at the
same time as children. Chickens that had become
lame were found to have suffered motor neurone
damage. The poliovirus only infected humans and
thus could not have caused the animals'
paralysis. Exposure to poisons, on the other
hand, can damage many different species at the same time.

2 Most cases of paralysis were incurred within 48
hours of each other. That is not the pattern for
infectious outbreaks, which start slowly, grow
faster as the infection spreads and then diminish
as immunity develops. It is the pattern of a mass poisoning event.

3 Parents reported that some children fell ill
immediately after eating fresh fruit Fruit was
sprayed heavily with lead arsenate at the time.

4 The illness was relieved by the administration
of antidotes for chemical poisoning, and
chemicals associated with poisoning appeared in
the diseased tissues of the victims of paralytic
polio - including oestrogenic chemicals now
widely associated with environmental poisoning.

5 The spread of poliomyelitis was not affected by
the closure of schools, as it should have been if
the disease was infectious. Nor did close contact
with paralysed children spread paralysis. Yet the
virus presumed to cause the illness was highly
infectious, as was shown by the widespread
presence of antibodies for it among healthy individuals.

6 There was little or no correlation between the
prevalence of polio antibodies in the population
and the incidence of paralytic polio. In fact
patients deemed to be recovering from paralytic
polio were found to `be completely lacking' in polio antibodies.(38)

7 And the most virulent viral epidemics occur
when viruses are newly introduced into
populations. The poliovirus had been present long
before the epidemics started. The use of chemical
pesticides, in contrast, began just before the epidemics started.

Slowly, the US authorities began to act.
Following the FDA secured legislative
restrictions on the use of pesticides in 1954(39)
and 1956(40), the incidence of infantile
paralysis in the US plummeted immediately. By the
time Jonas Salk's polio vaccine was publicly
released in 1955, the level of infantile
paralysis in the US was already below a half of
what it had been in 1952. The figures for the UK
were even more dramatic: the incidence of
infantile paralysis fell by more than 82 per cent
between 1950 and the first mass administration of the vaccine in 1957.



The case against the polio virus

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

1 It had been around humans for thousands of
years and in nature only reproduces in human
throats or guts. Such viruses are normally
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 stronger resistance to illness.

2 If it were the dangerous 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 virology. These are called
the Koch Postulates. They set up the rules for
declaring a disease to be caused by a virus. The
1st Postulate states that the virus 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.(25)

4 It widely infects children 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 parents. 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 Control and Prevention
(CDC) has published a theory to explain this
extraordinary behaviour. The children of US
middle-class parents were uniquely liable to fall
ill with infantile paralysis because in their
infancy parents kept them away from the dirt in
which the virus lives. This meant these children
were not infected when it was safest - while
protected by their mothers' milk. Once again,
this theory contradicted everything known about
infectious illness: good hygiene nearly always
stops epidemics; with infantile paralysis, the
CDC argued, good hygiene was the cause.(26)

Furthermore, the CDC's theory was based on the
assumption that working-class children are
uniquely exposed to ordinary dirt. Yet surely
middle-class children also go out into the
garden? The theory was also conceived without
checking medical reports on the early epidemics
of infantile paralysis. Referring to a 1908
epidemic in 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
reality, they were the ones who fell ill.

6 If guilty of causing paralysis, it would have
to travel from the gut through the formidable
blood-brain barrier that protects our brains and
spinal cords. We still have not observed it doing
this, despite many decades of intense research.

7 It is rarely found in human blood - the easiest
route from the gut to the blood-brain barrier.
Yet this is where Jonas Salk's vaccine was supposed to intercept it.

8 It has never been observed reproducing in victims' motor neurone cells.27

An alternative proposition

Poliomyelitis researcher Dr Ralph Scobey
suggested in 1954 a reason why viruses might be
found on damaged motor neuron cells in cases of
infantile paralysis. He posited that the body
itself might activate or produce these viruses,
perhaps when under threat or to clean up cellular
damage. While `the fundamental cause of human
poliomyelitis appears to be a poison or toxin',
Scobey said, `the virus is synthesised or
activated within the human body as a result of
the poisoning'. He suggested that the virus might
remain `dormant' within cells until something
activates it. We now know that the poliovirus can
be dormant. It is also widely known that
toxic-damaged tissues attract viruses. One of the
standard tests for toxins, the Ames Assay,
utilises the fact that if viruses mutate and
multiply in the presence of a certain amount of a
chemical then that amount is dangerously toxic.
Scobey went on to list anti-toxins that had
proved effective in curing polio, citing 11
scientific papers written between 1936 and 1949.(28)