Polio 

A mystery with enormous implications has stumped some of the smartest minds in cancer research. How, might a cancer-causing monkey virus, wind up in human tumors?  The mystery began in 1988 with Dr. Michael Carbone. He found the SV40 virus in 60% of the human lung tumors he was studying, (SV40 stands for Simian Virus the 40^th virus found). Eventually, sixty different labs confirmed the results.

 http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2000/02/002bookchin.htm

In the same year in Boston, two researchers stumbled onto something disturbing. Dr. Robert Garcea and his assistant, Dr. John Bergsagel, were using a powerful new tool called polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, to look for a pair of common human viruses in children's brain tumors. But a different DNA footprint kept popping up in more than half the tumors. They finally realized they were seeing SV40. For more than a decade, scientists had reported sporadic findings of SV40-like proteins in human tumors. But the earlier tests were primitive and the results suspect. PCR, however, is capable of amplifying infinitesimal fragments of DNA, which makes detections far more credible. The findings were troubling. The researchers noted in their published report that the children were too young to have received the contaminated vaccine. But somehow the virus had infected them and embedded itself in their tumors. 

PCR unleashed a wave of SV40 discoveries. By the end of 1996, dozens of scientists reported finding SV40 in a variety of bone cancers and a wide range of brain cancers, which had risen 30 percent over the previous 20 years. Then, Italian researchers reported finding SV40 in 45 percent of the seminal fluid samples and 23 percent of the blood samples they had taken from healthy donors. That meant SV40 could have been spreading through sexual activity, from mother to child, or by other means, which could explain how those never inoculated with the contaminated vaccine, such as the Boston children, were being infected.

The Oral Sabin Polio vaccine is cultured in monkey kidney tissue. Vaccine makers insist every batch of Polio vaccine is screened for contaminants such as SV40.  But a lawyer involved in a recent Polio case just published a report claiming the contamination continues. "Many here voice a silent view that the Salk and Sabin Polio vaccine, being made of monkey kidney tissue has been directly responsible for the major increase in Leukemia in this country,” states Dr. Frederick Klenner Polio Researcher, USA. This disease hardly occurs in the West anymore. However, it seems the days of Polio are still with us. Not in the form of acute viral outbreaks of fever and paralysis, but in the  unexplored statistics on the long-term effects from the viral contaminated Polio vaccines given to countless children and adults three decades ago. What other undetectable monkey viruses have been transmitted in the vaccine batches lately? These unanswered questions continue to resurface in today's research and still riddle retired scientist Ben Sweet. As a senior research scientist for a major pharmaceutical company from 1959 to 1964, Dr. Sweet was one of those responsible for the research, development and field-testing of the killed Polio virus vaccine.   As many as twenty six of the Simian contaminants were readily detected but still other viruses, like SV40 slipped past rigorous quality control testing procedures available at that time.

Four years after the development of the Salk vaccine, Bernice Eddy of the National Institutes of Health discovered the contamination of the vaccine with SV40. she noticed something strange while looking through her microscope. Monkey kidney cells, the same kind used to make the vaccine. were dying without apparent cause. So she tried an experiment. She prepared kidney extracts from eight to ten rhesus monkeys and injected tiny amounts under the skin of twenty-three new born hamsters. Within nine months, ‘large, malignant, subcutaneous tumors’ appeared on twenty of the animals. On July 6, 1960, concerned that a monkey virus might be contaminating the polio vaccine, Eddy took her findings to Dr. Joseph Smadel, chief of the NIH’s biologics division. Smadel dismissed the tumors as harmless ‘lumps.’ The same year, however, at a Merck laboratory in Pennsylvania, Dr. Maurice Hilleman (don't miss this video) and Dr. Ben Sweet isolated the virus. They called it simian virus 40, or SV40, because it was the 40^th virus found in rhesus kidney tissue.

In the aftermath of the debacle, Bernice Eddy was taken off of polio research and transferred to the influenza section by the thankless NIH management. She shared her frustrations with a small group of women scientists who ate brown-bag lunches on the steps of one of the laboratories. There, Eddy met a tenacious woman scientist named Sarah Stewart, who was waging her own battle against the official paradigms of bureaucratic medicine. Bernice Eddy and Sarah Stewart became close friends. Sarah Stewart’s name remains virtually unknown today despite her huge contribution to modern medicine. Not only did she prove that some cancers were caused by viruses, but subsequent research on the virus she discovered led o the discovery of DNA recombination, which is the most powerful tool in medical research today. From the beginning, Sarah Stewart promoted the idea that cancer was caused by viruses. Due to this, she was not well accepted by the NIH or NCI staffs who described her as ‘an eccentric lady’ determined to prove her theory was right. ‘No one believed her .’ Finally, she was given access to an NCI laboratory in Bethesda where she could try to prove her theories. In 1953, she almost succeeded, but her work was not accepted by the ruling crowd at NIH. They found her methods sloppy and objected to the fact that she did not culture her viruses. So in 1956, her lunch partner Bernice Eddy showed Sarah Stewart how to grow her viruses in a culture of mouse cells. She now had all the ingredients she needed and began a series of experiments which are called ‘classic’ by modern day NIH researchers. In 1957, Stewart and Eddy discovered the polyoma virus which produced several types of cancer in a variety of small mammals. Polyoma proved that some cancers were indeed caused by viruses. Her discovery officially threw open the doors of cancer virology. As Rabson phrased it, ‘Suddenly, the whole place just exploded after Sarah found polyoma.’ It was the beginning of a new era of hope. But it raised some dark questions about earlier deeds. Before long Yale’s laboratory discovered that the polyoma virus that had produced the cancer in Stewart’s mice and hamsters turned out to be virtually identical to Simian Virus #40 (SV-40). In October 1960, Eddy gave a talk to the Cancer Society in New York and, without warning NIH in advance, announced that she had examined cells from the monkeys kidneys in which the polio virus was grown and had found they were infected with cancer causing viruses. Her inference was clear: There were cancer-causing monkey viruses in the polio vaccine. She warned  an epidemic of cancer in America was in the making. When the word got back to her NIH bosses, they exploded in anger. When the cussing stopped, they crushed Bernice Eddy professionally. Any mention of cancer-causing monkey viruses in the polio vaccine was not welcomed by NIH. They took away her lab, destroyed her animals, put her under a gag order, prevented her from attending professional meetings, and delayed publication of her scientific paper. In the words of Edward Shorter, author of The Health Century, ‘Her treatment became a scandal within the scientific community.’ Later, it became the subject of a congressional inquiry. In the words of Dr. Lawrence Kilham, a fellow NIH researcher who wrote a latter of protest to the Surgeon General’s office, ‘the presence of a cancer virus in the polio virus vaccine is the matter demanding full investigation.

Dr. Adi Gazdar of the University of Texas, who led the second study, said  it had to be more than coincidence that the four types of tumors found in hamsters after injection with SV40, brain, bone, mesothelioma and lymphomas, are now exactly the same tumor types in humans found with detectable levels of SV40.