For those who became paralyzed for life or died, polio was a dreadful disease. But even during major epidemics, less than 10% of people exposed had any symptoms and most of their symptoms were no more severe than those of a cold. Less than 1% developed paralysis and only three-eighths of one percent of all those exposed developed severe lifetime paralysis. According to the 1966 Canadian Bulletin of Medical History, in all of Canada in the 35 years from 1927-1962, only 49,711 cases of polio were recorded.
Although the Salk vaccine, first administered in the US in 1955, was hailed and continues to be hailed as a saviour, statistics show that polio cases increased rather than decreased following its initiation. In the April 9, 1960 Journal of the American Medical Association Dr Harold Fletcher predicted that, by the end of the year, one-sixth of those with polio paralysis would have had all three doses of Salk vaccine.
Acute flaccid paralysis (AFP), the type of paralysis that’s associated with polio, is still found today but often with no confirmation of the presence of a polio virus. For example, AFP is part of Guillain Barré syndrome which can result as an adverse reaction to neurotoxins in vaccines. Mercury in the flu shot and tetanus/diphtheria shot and aluminum in most vaccines, including the new HPV vaccine, are such neurotoxins.
Considering the generally mild nature of polio, the apparent limited efficacy of the Salk vaccine, and the occurrence of non-infectious AFP, one wonders if polio virus was the total reason for the epidemics of the 1940’s and 50’s. A series of articles by Dr Ralph Scobey published 1946-53 in The Archives of Pediatrics provided evidence that polio was a form of poisoning from the use of neurotoxins such as DDT, lead and arsenic compounds. The latter two were favoured as pesticides in the early 1900’s. In the 40’s and 50’s billions of pounds of DDT and BHC (benzene hexachloride) were used in agriculture and home gardens and for mosquito control. DDT was also commonly used in the dairy industry. In 1962, J I Rodale reported that DDT spraying programs were carried out regularly in many parts of USA as a precaution against polio but appeared to be unsuccessful and in some places to have increased the disease instead.
Babies who were not being breastfed because that practice had gone out of style no doubt consumed DDT-laced formula while their older siblings and adults guzzled back glasses of contaminated milk. When the milk ran out, they could drink water, which by the 1950’s was often fluoridated.
The cause of ‘post-polio syndrome’, a re-emergence of polio symptoms, is said to be unknown. However, US legislation which re-introduced DDT in 1983 by allowing it in pesticide blends was swiftly followed by this syndrome in hundreds of thousands of former cases of polio.
Paralysis was one of the many injuries that arose from smallpox vaccinations in the early 1900’s. ‘Infantile paralysis’, later renamed ‘polio’, often occurred in the limb that had been vaccinated. Later, vaccines against typhoid fever, diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough continued and increased this ‘provocation polio’ as it was called. Other provocateurs included injections of cortisone, bismuth, guanine and penicillin. Today’s vaccines, supposedly more technically advanced, still carry the risk of central nervous system disease.
Yet another possible environmental stimulus of disease that’s classified as ‘infectious’ is alterations in the relative predominance of pathogens due to mass vaccination programs. In the case of polio vaccine, the three polio strains found in the human gut prior to the inception of the Salk injected- and the Sabin oral-vaccines have been joined by at least 69 genetically-similar viral strains that are associated with polio-like disease. The result has been more cases of post-polio syndrome as well as ‘chronic fatigue syndrome’ and ‘myalgic encephalomyelitis’.
Whatever the causes of polio, its relative insignificance as a health problem at the time the vaccines were introduced is likely an indication that natural immunity played a significant part in its demise in North American. Rather than continuing the frustratingly difficult attempt to eradicate polio in developing countries by dropping Sabin vaccine into the mouths of enfeebled, immune-deficient children, wouldn’t it make more sense to clear their environments of poisons? Not only is the campaign not working, the live vaccine viruses have become endemic and children are being paralyzed and killed by repeated use of the vaccine.
(Much of the information in this article came from Polio Perspectives by Edda West which you can read on the ‘Polio’ pages of www.vran.org.)