20-things-you-dont-know-about-polio/

mudra wrote:7. Polio had and has NO ability to spread from infected victims to the uninfected. Polio infected clusters of people in the exact same areas, suddenly and swiftly. http://bit.ly/1P6zShV

. . . On April 12 1955, Salk’s polio vaccine was pronounced totally safe and effective in providing complete protection against poliomyelitis (infantile paralysis), when it was launched by the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis before an invited audience of 500 doctors and 200 journalists. The launch ceremony was relayed by closed-circuit television to some 54,000 doctors in cities throughout the US and Canada.

Salk was immediately awarded a Congressional Medal by US president Dwight Eisenhower. Church bells were rung in celebration of Salk’s victory. In The Manchester Guardian, Alistair Cooke wrote: ‘Nothing short of the overthrow of the Communist regime in the Soviet Union could bring such rejoicing to the hearts and homes in America as the historic announcement last Tuesday that the 166-year war against poliomyelitis is almost certainly at an end.’

Medical Fraud

The triumph following the launch of the Salk vaccine was short-lived. The medical historian Dr M Beddow Baily recorded what happened next: ‘Only 13 days after the vaccine had been acclaimed by the whole of the US press and radio as one of the greatest medical discoveries of the century, and two days after the British ministry of health had announced it would go right ahead with the manufacture of the vaccine, came the first news of disaster. Children inoculated with one brand of the vaccine had developed poliomyelitis. In the following days more and more cases were reported, some of them after inoculation with other brands.’

Within two weeks of the launch the number of cases of polio in vaccinated children had nearly reached 200. This created near panic in the White House. President Eisenhower had publicly endorsed the vaccine at its launch, so he sent the US health secretary Oveta Hobby to make it very plain to the Surgeon General that the president needed to be spared the embarrassment of further such cases.

On 8 May 1955 the Surgeon General suspended the entire US production of the vaccine. After hurried meetings between Salk, manufacturers and the surgeon general, distribution of the vaccine was resumed five days later, with new regulations in place to ensure better standards in the vaccine laboratories. The general consensus was that these cases had been caused by viruses in the vaccine that had survived the formaldehyde, despite evidence that repeated injections can cause paralysis.

However, despite these new regulations, four months later more than 2,000 cases of infantile paralysis were recorded in Boston, despite the vaccination of 130,000 children in the city. The previous year it had seen only 273 cases. The number of cases doubled in vaccinated New York State and Connecticut, and tripled in Vermont. They increased by five times in both Rhode Island and Wisconsin. Many were paralysed in the injected arm.

It seemed that the vaccine would soon be totally discredited. So, to protect the President, Salk, the vaccine manufacturers and themselves from the humiliation of an unmitigated failure, the US health authorities had to dramatically slash the incidence of poliomyelitis. They managed this by simply changing the way they recorded the incidents of poliomyelitis. It worked like this:

Prior to 1956, the authorities recorded a patient as having paralytic polio (infantile paralysis) if they suffered from paralytic symptoms for 24 hours.

After 1956 patients had to have these paralytic symptoms for at least 60 days to be counted as having polio. As many people recovered within 60 days, this measure alone dramatically cut the official number of cases. This ‘drop’ in polio cases was publicly credited to the vaccine. Furthermore, all cases of polio occurring within 30 days of vaccination (such as the first 200 cases that had so alarmed the White House) were in future not to be blamed on the vaccine but to be recorded as ‘pre-existing’.

But Salk continued to worry. Despite its regulatory and statistical ‘success’, the reputation of his vaccine was plummeting. In June 1955 the British doctors’ union the Medical Practitioners’ Union wrote: ‘These misfortunes would be almost endurable if a whole new generation were to be rendered permanently immune to the disease. In fact, there is no evidence that any lasting immunity is achieved.’

Prior to 1958 the definition of infantile paralysis (polio) included cases in which paralysis was minimal: perhaps manifesting itself as a very stiff neck, often accompanied by widespread pain. Polio also included cases of ‘meningitis’, or of inflammation of the membrane that protects the brain and spinal neurons. The CDC describes such cases as ‘serious but rarely fatal’.

Prior to 1958 these cases were scientifically referred to as ‘non-paralytic poliomyelitis’, or polio for short. Henceforward, they would be reclassified. The Los Angeles County health authorities stated: ‘Most cases reported prior to July 1 1958 of non-paralytic poliomyelitis are now reported as viral or aseptic meningitis.’ The incidence of meningitis soared as official polio cases declined, as the following table (compiled from national surveillance reports) shows.

Non-paralytic polio cases | Aseptic meningitis cases:

• 1951-1960:    70,083 | 0
  
• 1961-1982:    589       | 102,999
  
• 1983-1992:   0            | 117,366
  

(Jim West, Images of Poliomyelitis)

The following month Canada suspended its distribution of Salk’s vaccine. By November all European countries had suspended distribution plans, apart from Denmark. By January 1957 17 US states had stopped distributing the vaccine. The same year The New York Times reported that nearly 50 per cent of cases of infantile paralysis in children between the ages of five and 14 had occurred after vaccination.

So, more regulatory and statistical changes were needed in order to give the polio vaccine the appearance of a triumph of modern medicine. What better way to achieve this than to reclassify all the cases of polio into numerous other diseases resulting in a massive reduction in polio cases, and a host of other diseases to attract funding. And this is exactly what they did.

These classifications are still used today. Last year the US National Center for Infectious Diseases reported no cases of poliomyelitis but 30,000 to 50,000 cases of aseptic meningitis requiring hospitalisation. There are probably several times this number of incidents of aseptic meningitis that did not require hospitalisation, but statistics are no longer kept for such cases.

Then another scam was enacted to massage down the poliomyelitis figures. It took advantage of the 1951 discovery that different viruses could be present in cases of infantile paralysis. Prior to 1958 this did not matter. A doctor diagnosed a person with polio by taking note of their evident symptoms. They did not investigate to see if the poliovirus were present. In 1958 a new regulation was put in place requiring doctors to only register a patient as having polio if the poliovirus were present, something that was very difficult to establish for sure. For a start, it was impossible to tell by looking at symptoms. The Textbook of Child Neurology reported: ‘Coxsackie virus and echoviruses can cause paralytic syndromes that are clinically indistinguishable from paralytic poliomyelitis.’ This new requirement for doctors caused a vast drop in the number of cases registered as poliomyelitis – a drop that ever since has been credited solely to the vaccine.

So, when patients diagnosed as having polio in a 1958 epidemic in Detroit were re-tested as required by this new rule, 49 per cent were found to have no poliovirus. They had to be reclassified as having ‘non-poliomyelitis acute flaccid paralysis’ even though they were suffering from symptoms identical to poliomyelitis with the same paralysis and the same pain. Other polio cases were reclassified as ‘Guillian-Barré syndrome’, which some researchers now think is what crippled Roosevelt. Yet more cases are now referred to as ‘Hand, Foot and Mouth Disease’, which can also cause paralysis. And last year the Coxsackie virus was found in cases of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS), which sometimes shows polio-like symptoms of muscle damage; in the past CFS might have been classified as a form of polio.

If this process of reclassification had not occurred, it would have been impossible to hide the fact that infantile paralysis cases had sharply increased after the introduction of Salk’s vaccine. Without the Coxsackie and aseptic meningitis reclassifications, for example, the number of reported cases of paralytic polio would have doubled from 2,500 in 1957 to 5,000 in 1959.

This deliberate fraud did not go entirely unnoticed, however. Dr Bernard Greenberg, the then head of the Department of Biostatistics at the University of North Carolina, testified at a 1962 Congressional hearing that infantile paralysis cases had increased after the introduction of the vaccine by 50 per cent from 1957 to 1958, and by 80 per cent from 1958 to 1959. He concluded that US health officials had manipulated the statistics to give entirely the opposite impression. . .

Seashore wrote:We need a revolution in medical science!  Fraud from the past needs to be clearly exposed.  Doctors need to be enlightened.  Medical schools need to be revamped.  All of society needs to be re-educated.  We need a total paradigm shift.