POLIO VIRUS + DDT = POLIO

It's not Either Or; It's Both And

This is apparently an old ad for DDT.

https://www.sciencehistory.org/distillations/the-ddt-collector

Following are highlights from: "The Age of Polio: How an Old Virus and New Toxins Triggered a Man-Made Epidemic" By Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill at https://www.ageofautism.com/2011/09/the-age-of-polio-how-an-old-virus-and-new-toxins-triggered-a-man-made-epidemic.html.

I think this is an important finding about polio. They said they wrote a paper about Autism previously, so I want to check it out and maybe copy highlights in another post here. Also I want to compile some info I’ve been collecting on Rabies, if I get time and if it seems worthwhile.

Part 1, The Wrong Narrative

_The {mainstream} narrative is by now familiar: Random, inexplicable outbreaks paralyzed and killed thousands of infants and children and struck raw terror into 20th century parents, triggering a worldwide race to identify the virus and develop a vaccine. Success ushered in the triumphant era of mass vaccination. Now polio’s last hideouts amid the poorest of the poor in Asia and Africa are under relentless siege by, among others, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Eradication is just a matter of time, and many more illnesses will soon meet the same fate.

_But based on our research over the past two years, we believe this narrative is wrong – and wrong for reasons that go beyond mere historical interest. The misunderstanding of polio has warped the public health response to modern illnesses in ways that actually make them harder to prevent, control, and treat.

_The reality, we believe, is that the virus itself was just half the epidemic equation -- necessary but not sufficient to create The Age of Polio. Outbreaks were not caused solely by poliovirus – the microbe was an ancient and heretofore harmless intestinal bug -- but by its interaction with a new toxin, most often innovative pesticides used to treat fruits and vegetables.

_This alternative narrative makes better sense of the natural history of polio, and it resolves a number of anomalies that remain to this day. It suggests why poliomyelitis outbreaks emerged, evolved, and exploded the way they did; it probably solves, for the first time, the enduring riddle of why Franklin D. Roosevelt was afflicted 90 years ago this summer on Campobello Island; and it may mean today’s billion-dollar-a-year eradication effort is misguided, if not downright quixotic.

_Polio was a strange illness, never fully understood even by those who devoted their lives to studying and subduing it. It was a summer plague, coming on in late spring and all but vanishing in the fall. Many thought contagion had something to do with water, and Americans kept their children away from swimming pools in droves.

_There is a profound distinction between poliovirus – an enterovirus, one that enters through the mouth and takes up residence in the GI tract and bloodstream – and poliomyelitis, the paralytic form of the illness. In the vast majority of cases, the virus causes either a minor illness or an inapparent infection.

_But in 1 or 2 in 100 cases, the virus somehow gets past multiple defenses and into the nervous system, where it finds its way to the anterior horn cells at the top front of the spinal column. There, it preferentially attacks the gray-colored motor neurons (polio means gray in Greek) and causes inflammation of the protective myelin sheath (myelitis). This interferes with nerve signals to the muscles and can lead to temporary or permanent paralysis of the limbs and the respiratory system. A small number of people who contract poliomyelitis -- on the order of 1 percent -- die.

_What is most remarkable about this list is that so few outbreaks of paralytic polio were recorded anywhere in the world before the latter 19th century. Poliomyelitis is considered an ancient scourge, but the evidence supporting that belief is quite threadbare. An oft-cited Egyptian drawing depicts a priest with a withered leg that could have stemmed from paralytic polio, but for most of recorded history there were few observations of the sudden-onset fever and paralysis in infants that characterizes the disease. The earliest well-documented case of infantile paralysis in an individual is widely considered to be Sir Walter Scott, afflicted as an infant in 1773.[ii]

_There is little question that the poliovirus was endemic in humans for millennia; there may even have been isolated cases of poliomyelitis for much of that period. Yet the poliovirus did not trigger widespread outbreaks of poliomyelitis. Setting aside for now the 1841 Louisiana outbreak, reported retrospectively, something seems to have happened around 1890 to launch The Age of Polio in the United States. And something else must have changed around the end of World War II to create the large modern epidemics seared into the minds of older Americans, thousands of whom are poliomyelitis survivors and almost all of whom know someone who was afflicted.

{NOTE RE MERCURY IN VAXES}

_While we have not written about polio, we have seen this pattern before. In our book, The Age of Autism – Mercury, Medicine, and a Man-made Epidemic, we argued that something happened in the 1930s to launch The Age of Autism.[iii] We proposed it was the commercialization of ethyl mercury compounds for use in pesticides – seed disinfectants and lumber preservatives – and in vaccinations; we offered evidence of those inventions in the family backgrounds of the first autism cases identified in the medical literature, in 1943. Similarly, we proposed that the sharp rise in autism cases beginning around 1990 tracks with the federal government recommending several more mercury-containing shots.

_Our attention was drawn to polio during our autism research when a virologist mentioned, in passing, that poliomyelitis could be triggered in some instances by injections. Called “provocation poliomyelitis,”[iv] this can happen when a needle stick punctures a nerve in the peripheral nervous system. An active poliovirus infection – typically, in a child exposed to the virus for the first time and not yet immune -- can gain access to the nervous system through a process called “retrograde axonal transport,” traveling back to the spinal column and triggering the dreaded paralytic form, poliomyelitis.

_Such cases of provocation paralysis, we learned, occurred in Eastern Europe when antibiotics were excessively administered by injection; this practice led to multiple cases of poliomyelitis.[v] Bulbar polio – of the throat and respiratory system – was recognized as more common after tonsillectomies, again because nerve endings had been exposed.[vi] Outbreaks, then, can unquestionably occur as a result of an environmental injury, in these instances either excessive injection or surgery that led to peripheral nerve damage, in the presence of poliovirus infection.

_We began to look at the poliomyelitis literature and found that another and much more comprehensive environmental theory of the disease had been put forward almost immediately after the early outbreaks, although it never gained mainstream attention. This theory proposed that what is called “polio” is not caused by a virus at all, but by poisoning from pesticides. In this theory, lead arsenate triggered the early clusters, and DDT kicked off the large outbreaks after World War II. (The pesticide theory has been championed in recent years by Jim West[vii] and by Janine Robert[viii].)

_That really got our attention. In our research for The Age of Autism, we investigated a paralytic illness we believe resulted from an unrecognized interaction between a toxin and a microbe. Called general paralysis of the insane, or GPI, it was a gruesome and universally fatal outcome in a percentage of people infected years earlier with the syphilis bacteria. We proposed that a manmade mercury compound -- ironically used to “treat” syphilis -- allowed syphilis to gain entrance to the brain. When penicillin was developed in the 1940s and actually killed syphilis infections, GPI disappeared because one of the two requirements for the illness – the microbe – was destroyed.

_We suggested that a number of other illnesses may follow a similar pattern in which microbes and metals interact, including, in some instances, autism. So the idea that an environmental insult – whether a needle stick or surgery or a toxic metals exposure – could be at work in outbreaks of poliomyelitis intrigued us.

_But we did not find the claim that polio was simply poisoning by pesticides alone to be persuasive. The strong versions of both the virus theory and the pesticide theory – that it was entirely one or the other – are too simple to explain the pattern of evidence. The strong viral theory can’t explain the sudden emergence of poliomyelitis; the strong pesticide theory can’t explain the sudden protective effect of poliovirus vaccinations. Rather, we propose that poliomyelitis outbreaks are man-made events that result from the synergy of microbe and toxin.

_A threshold question – one that requires an answer for our argument to make sense – concerns what scientists call biological plausibility. What is the mechanism by which the virus and a toxin could cause such damage? We’ll look at the particular properties of lead and arsenate shortly, but our fundamental idea is that both the poliovirus and the pesticide enter the body by the same route -- they are ingested -- and both end up in the stomach. There, the toxin could damage the stomach lining in such a way that the virus gains access to peripheral nerves. This kind of virus-toxin interaction (perhaps with arsenic or lead acting alone as the toxin) took place sporadically before 1890 and increased dramatically, we propose, with the invention of more potent insecticides like lead arsenate. With the advent of DDT, the interaction became even more dangerous, dramatically increasing the number of cases.

_The idea that toxins have played any role in poliomyelitis outbreaks is not widely accepted, to say the least. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1995 book, Polio, Peter Oshinsky dismisses it in a sentence: By 1952, the peak year of the epidemic, the search for answers had grown so desperate that “a few blamed the dumping of poisons into the environment, especially the pesticide DDT,” he writes.[ix]

_Yet on the very next page, Oshinsky describes a farm family, frantic about the epidemic sweeping Iowa that awful summer. The parents “tested the well water – it was fine – and used extra DDT to drive away flies.” Still, nine of their 11 children were affected, two of them paralyzed. The family “had done everything they were told to do,” Oshinsky writes, “everything they could. Why had it happened to them?”

_Why, indeed? The search for an answer begins in the 1850s in Medford, Massachusetts.

Part 2, A Gypsy Moth Flaps Its Wings

_{Wikipedia says: The gypsy moth ... was introduced in 1868 into the United States by Étienne Léopold Trouvelot, a French scientist living in Medford, Massachusetts. {{Eventually, some moths escaped and started spreading.}} ... The first US outbreak occurred in 1889 in the New England states.}

_The state {of Massachusetts} put together a Gypsy Moth Commission with an urgent mandate: Kill the bugs dead.

_A scientist working for the commission quickly found a solution. Adding lead to arsenic proved lethal to the larvae, and the new compound was sprayed on trees in and around Boston starting in 1893.

_Something else of note happened in 1893 in the Boston area. ... Paralysis in infants ... suddenly increased {from about 6 in a 3 month period} to 23.

_{Arsenate of Lead continued to be sprayed on fruit trees etc until it was banned in 1988.}

_Lead and arsenic can kill and paralyze humans. Whether ingested or inhaled, several metals have long been recognized as hazards in the workplace and for miners; in Roman times, work in mercury mines was so lethal that only slaves and prisoners were sent into them. More recently, lead was removed from gasoline and paint because both inhalation and ingestion can stunt the mental development of children; arsenic has been banned from medicine and agricultural use in the United States

_Lead arsenate can paralyze and kill animals that ingest it.

_In early polio epidemics, both animals and people suffered from paralysis. ... Something was causing polio-like symptoms in both humans and animals at the same time, in the same place.

_Astonishingly, lead arsenate was proposed as a cause of polio outbreaks early on.

_Why did such strong clues about the nature of a disease that followed the planting season like clockwork year after year fail to crystallize in the minds of researchers?

_The simple answer is that right from the start, the wrong people were in charge of connecting the dots.

_In the 1962 classic Silent Spring, Rachel Carson addressed this kind of convenient blindness and bias when she wrote about the inability of parties with an economic interest to acknowledge the damage pesticides caused to wildlife. ... {She wrote:} “Yet it is the control men in state and federal governments – and of course the chemical manufacturers – who steadfastly deny the facts reported by the biologists and declare they see little evidence of harm to wildlife."

_And so poliomyelitis spread unchecked through the first two decades of the 20th century before snaring, in 1921, its most famous victim.

Part 3, Making Sense of Campobello

_More than 90 percent of the world’s commercial blueberries are grown in Washington County, {Maine} and Cherryfield is a major processing and shipping center.

_Two miles offshore is the island of Campobello, part of New Brunswick, Canada, where Franklin D. Polio Campobello HouseRoosevelt and his family spent summers. It was on his “beloved island” in August, 1921 – ninety years ago – that Roosevelt was afflicted with a paralytic illness diagnosed as poliomyelitis {at age 39}.

_But this remote and lightly populated area already had a significant history with polio – one of the first clusters in the United States occurred in Cherryfield a quarter-century earlier, in 1896.... Seven children were affected, and one died. In all the discussion and theorizing about Roosevelt’s illness over the intervening decades, this convergence has been overlooked.

Part 4, Post-War Epidemics and the Triumph of Vaccination

_In 1949 ... Drs. Morton S. Biskind and Irving Bieber published “DDT Poisoning – A New Symptom With Neuropsychiatric Manifestations” in the American Journal of Psychotherapy.

_Biskind linked DDT directly to cases of poliomyelitis – including a Dec. 12, 1950, statement to the Select Committee to Investigate the Use of Chemicals in Food Products, United States House of Representatives.[iii] He quoted another doctor that “wherever DDT had been used intensively against polio, not only was there an epidemic of the syndrome I have described but the incidence of polio continued to rise and in fact appeared where it had not been before.

_“This is not surprising since it is known that not only can DDT poisoning produce a condition that may easily be mistaken for polio in an epidemic but also being a nerve poison itself, may damage cells in the spinal cord and thus increase the susceptibility to the virus.”

_Lead arsenate was an inorganic pesticide, DDT an organochlorine compound. Both cause neurons to fire randomly, interfering with the ability of the brain to communicate with the rest of the body and leading to paralysis, spasms and death. DDT’s unintended impact on other living things was recognized after Silent Spring, though the focus then was on wildlife, not humans. That was enough to get both DDT and lead arsenate banned in the United States.

_Because DDT required a co-factor – the poliovirus – to trigger outbreaks of poliomyelitis, the effect on humans was missed. Adding to the complexity may be the fact, observed in “horse orchard disease,” that living things react with different levels of sensitivity to toxins.

_So DDT, we believe, succeeded lead arsenate not just as the insecticide of choice, but as an even more potent environmental co-factor in polio outbreaks. Understanding the role these toxins played was a significant insight and deserved serious attention, just as the early concerns about lead arsenate might have ended The Age of Polio almost as soon as it began.

_The DDT theory, like the lead arsenate observation, failed because it wrongly dismissed the equally important role of the virus itself. It could not account for the prompt collapse of polio in the U.S. after the vaccine was developed. The vaccine clearly eliminated outbreaks in the United States. Subsequent attempts to show that domestic DDT use waned about the same time, or that polio was reclassified as other illnesses in an elaborate “scam” to hide the vaccine’s ineffectiveness, don’t really stand up against the evidence.

Allow me to interrupt. I read Neil Miller’s book about vaccines being unsafe and ineffective long ago. The 2015 edition is advertised here. The book persuaded me that vaxes are unsafe and ineffective and that they suppress (harm) the immune system. Dr. Mercola interviewed a doctor over a decade ago who claimed that the first immunizations were successful because they were not injected. Instead, patients’ arms were scratched and a little pus or something containing a virus was applied to the scratch. This apparently engaged the immune system, which is strongest just under the skin and in the GI tract lining. Injections bypass this strongest part of the immune system and cause toxicity and weakening of the immune system IMO.

The paragraph above claims that the polio vaxes were safe and effective. The statement that {The vaccine clearly eliminated outbreaks in the United States. Subsequent attempts to show that domestic DDT use waned about the same time, or that polio was reclassified as other illnesses in an elaborate “scam” to hide the vaccine’s ineffectiveness, don’t really stand up against the evidence.} I haven’t seen such evidence. If I find such evidence, I may change my mind a little, but I think it’s definitely true that the polio vaxes contained SV40 monkey viruses that have caused a lot of cancer in those who were vaxed. Their denial of the other suggested causes of the decline of polio doesn’t persuade me. I just added a NOTE in Part 1 above to show that the authors acknowledge that vaxes contain Mercury, which is toxic, similar to lead and arsenic. So I think they have some pro-vax bias to overlook that fact and the fact of other toxins in vaxes.

_Infantile paralysis occurred before lead arsenate was invented in 1893. How do we explain that? And what about polio outbreaks that have continued in the absence of either lead arsenate or DDT pesticides? Do they fit our new narrative?

Part 5, Before

_Our research on the natural history of autism convinced us that while there may have been a few scattered cases throughout history, the disorder first occurred in appreciable numbers – as clusters and ultimately as an epidemic -- only after 1930. Observations at that time about the rarity and novelty of the disorder are far more persuasive than retrospective efforts to claim significant numbers of cases before then.

_The same holds true for poliovirus.

_Just as arsenic and lead caused instances of paralysis before the invention of lead arsenate, there was also an emerging medical literature of poliomyelitis before recurring outbreaks began in 1893. Beginning just before 1800, there’s a history of doctors who took a reasonable cut at identifying the disease.

_Outbreaks of more than one case, then, were a distinctly 19th-century phenomenon, and until the 1890s {there were only about 9 small outbreaks in the U.S. and western Europe from 1835-1887}.

_Obviously, all these cases were described before the invention of lead arsenate in 1893. So there were undoubtedly other ways to make this pattern occur; a prime suspect would be arsenic in other forms, as well as other toxic metals, since they are well known to cause paralysis in workers and others exposed to them.

_Teething powders containing calomel – mercurous chloride – were used beginning around then, and mercury is well-known to cause paralysis. Mercury in medicine was so widespread that it doubtless caused numerous disorders identified as something else, especially by the doctors who prescribed it.

_So a number of outbreaks might be explained by exposures to metals, including earlier pesticides and other products and medicines containing arsenic. The arsenic-containing Paris Green was originally a pigment and was used in wallpaper as early as 1814.

_As for the larger Scandinavian clusters in the later 1880s, northern climes – think Campobello Island, Canada – are hospitable to berries. Also, apples are grown there and are part of the traditional cuisine. Keeping “worms” (actually codling moths, not gypsy moths) out of apples was something people were obviously concerned about for a long time before the war on gypsy moths provided the tools to fight codling moths.

_But none of these reached the scale, or occurred with the frequency, of poliomyelitis outbreaks after 1893 and the invention of lead arsenate. This leads to the second test of our theory – once lead arsenate and DDT disappeared from the scene, why did poliomyelitis outbreaks continue, albeit in diminished fashion?

The Persistence of Polio

_To summarize our theory: Polio is a virus, contagious like other viruses, and generally a harmless enterovirus. When it is introduced into the human body, it has the capacity to enter the nervous system when nerves are damaged. Damage can occur many ways: mechanically through needle puncture or surgery, or, we propose, biochemically via pesticidal or other toxic exposure. Once the virus enters the nervous system, it becomes dangerous in a way nature never allowed before. It spreads through the nervous system via "retrograde axonal transport." The resulting damage can lead to paralysis or death.

_Two regions of the world continue to experience polio outbreaks, despite hopes the virus would be eradicated by 2000. This persistence has surprised and confused the experts.

_“The eradication campaign has been stalled from about 2002 to 2007 … Why is it so difficult to complete the global eradication of wild poliovirus?” asked Neal Nathanson of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in a 2008 medical review, “The Pathogenesis of Poliomyelitis: What We Don’t Know.”[i] (What we don’t know turns out to be a lot – the paper runs to 50 pages.)

_“Currently, there are two epicenters that have resisted virus elimination, one in South Asia (Afghanistan, Pakistan, northern India) and one in West Africa (centered in Nigeria). What explains the persistence of wild polioviruses in these two foci?”

_Nathanson cites three possibilities: those are warm climates, so poliovirus doesn’t go dormant in the winter as it theoretically did in other countries; the prevalence of other enteroviruses means that the live-virus polio vaccine is not as effective because the other viruses interfere with it; and poor public health infrastructure couple with fears about vaccination made the achievement of “herd immunity” harder than expected.

_If one considers the toxin idea, however, another explanation jumps out, especially in South Asia. Erase national borders for a moment. While outbreaks are small and have waxed and waned over the past decade, the primary sites have been directly south of the Himalayan range in a smiley-face arc that runs west from Nepal and Bangladesh, through the Northern India districts of West Bengal, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, into Pakistan and Afghanistan.

_Polio map (Photo: The Ganga-Meghna-Bramhaputra River Basins: An arsenic hotbed below the Himalayas)

_This also happens to be the area with the worst mass poisoning from arsenic in human history. This is not ancient history – it didn’t even begin until the 1980s. It is a story of the single-minded war against microbes gone badly wrong. What happened is beautifully outlined in an American Scientist article, “No one checked: Natural Arsenic in Wells.”[ii]

_... {Regarding polio eradication} Bill Gates ... set a goal of 2013 but said, “Eradication is not guaranteed. It requires campaigns to give polio vaccine to all children under 5 in poor countries, at a cost of almost $1 billion per year.” [xiv]

_We believe a more cost-effective way to reduce and contain poliomyelitis outbreaks – as well as improve total health outcomes -- would be an all-out effort to reduce arsenic contamination and make sure people in South Asia have safe drinking water.