Polio: 1/1000 "infection" rate. Scientific discussion.

[Momtezuma Tuatara]

Note the first three words... IN MOST INFECTIONS....

http://www2.unescobkk.org/eubios/HGR/HGRCG.htm

From pp. 205-210 in Human Genome Research and Society Proceedings of the Second International Bioethics Seminar in Fukui, 20-21 March, 1992. Editors: Norio Fujiki, M.D. & Darryl R.J. Macer, Ph.D.

D. Charleton Gajdusek,

Director, NINDS, National Institutes of Health, USA

In most infections only a rare individual becomes ill or suffers rare complications, and that individual may be genetically predetermined, it usually is. For example, HTLV-1 infects 1-2 million Japanese, but only one in over a thousand gets adult advanced T cell leukemia after 40 years, and fortunately only about one in a thousand gets HAM, HTLV-1 associated myolopophy. Those unfortunate rare individuals are the problem, not the problem of the innocuous, or carriers, the other one thousand who die without ever knowing that they had it, and having no ill effect. The same can be said for poliomyelitis, where it takes 1,000 infected cases in order to induce ** a ** paralysis, the others don't know they were infected.

So this relates to the Minnesota psychosocial hysteria over the polio, but plainly it relates to many other infections.

Dr Vivian Wyatt also talks about genetic predetermination with regard to Polio, which can be shown in families, but its not the whole story, because Dr Sandler showed that "weakness" could be patched over when the diet was right. And it also has to be taken into account that polio was once endemic and never epidemic. That only started to happen at the end of the 1800's in large numbers.

Sure there had been isolated cases before that, but not on an epidemic scale. So why is it, that people get hysterical over polio or any other disease?

Shall we talk polio seriously on this thread?

Any takers? I could post my info here, or leave the topic.

[DevaMajka]

I'm interested. DS is not fully vaxed against polio, and I'm leaning VERY MUCH towards not getting any more (he has 2, which according to the cdc gives protection to 90% of people). I'm pretty sure dp is ok with that- but I'm also sure that the more info we have, the more he will be comfortable with it.

So, if you feel like sharing, there will be at least one person who will take advantage of it

..

[Plummeting]

I would love to talk about it. Unfortunately, I can't really contribute a lot to the discussion, but I'd love to read any information you or anyone else could provide.

[alegna]

Very interested. Also interested in other things being called polio. And what verification was done of "polio" cases in the hysteria of the 50s in the US. And what post-polio is (is there any virus involvement? or is it more physical muscle related?)

I also wonder with these new "cases" if it's been out in the wild all these years in the US after all.

-Angela

[USAmma]

Sure there had been isolated cases before that, but not on an epidemic scale. So why is it, that people get hysterical over polio or any other disease?

Shall we talk polio seriously on this thread?

Any takers? I could post my info here, or leave the topic.

Because Polio is a word that strikes fear into most people. They have heard stories from their relatives (at least I have). Many people still can remember, or have heard people talk about, scenes like this .

I wonder why so many people came down with it back then? Was it the polio vaccine that stopped the epidemic, or was it that the ones most vunerable to it were killed off and the ones who remained had developed a strong enough immunity that the virus didn't have much chance of developing further? Why is it still around in India and such places? I really would like to know more about this disease.

This got me thinking about the West Nile Virus, which has hit our area. Many people have gotten it but most don't know it. They just think they have the flu. Only the sickest ones go in for treatment at the hospital and only a very few of them actually die. Still, the city is spraying stuff in the the air in some of the neighborhoods, treating the ponds, and people slather themselves with repellant b/c they are so very afraid of dying from West Nile.

It's funny, I'm more afraid of Polio than West Nile even though my chances of getting WN are a lot higher. There is such an emotional rawness about Polio because it was a big part of the history of our grandparents. It goes beyond statistics and logic and reason.

[Isaac'smama]

Originally Posted by Plummeting

I would love to talk about it. Unfortunately, I can't really contribute a lot to the discussion, but I'd love to read any information you or anyone else could provide.

Ditto!!

[DesireeH]

Why is it still around in India and such places?

Probably because they still give the OPV, like they do in parts of Africa. Not to mention, when poverty is bad (like in the old days, even here in the US), health is bad. If you cant afford good food, clean water, sanitary living conditions......you are at a huge disadvantage. Then add improper sewage systems, etc...........

[Francy]

Originally Posted by DesireeH

If you cant afford good food, clean water, sanitary living conditions......you are at a huge disadvantage. Then add improper sewage systems, etc...........

but in the case of polio, the argument is often made that better hygiene is actually the problem. here is a typical quote (no citation, sorry, but you can find this "explanation" all over the place if you google):

"Ironically, the advanced state of public hygiene in most industrialized countries contributed to the century's epidemics. Infants or very young children became infected when open sewers were rampant, but their disease was so mild that many parents did not realize their children had polio. This "silent" infection provided lasting immunity. With the advent of indoor plumbing and other modern sanitary conditions, children were not exposed to the poliovirus in infancy and did not develop immunity. As a result, they were vulnerable to disease in late childhood and adulthood, when it posed a much more serious threat."

MT, what do you think about this? could this be an explanation for why polio seemed to appear on the scene rather late in our history? (note: i find the pesticide theories fascinating. how i wish they'd get more notice. but suppose for now that they are false. what about the "hygiene argument"? and if it is true...well, what if it is? what are the implications?

thanks!

[Francy]

here's something else i need help with.

as soon as i read the current amish story, i tried to get info about the 1979 outbreak. all i can find, over and over, is the same old statement that 14 (sometimes it's 10, or 15) amish people were paralyzed by polio (which started from an imported wild virus).

i keep reading that only about 1% (or less, since the figure "1 out of 200" is thrown around a lot) of polio cases are paralytic. does that mean that 1400 amish people were infected in all?? i can't find any figures on the total number who got polio, and which forms they got. what's the real story? where can i find the info?? (and why can't i find it? i have a ph.d. in googling.)

similarly, i keep running into the 1992 netherlands outbreak that says an epidemic began, affecting 68 people, paralyzing 59, and killing 2. 68 total, and 59 were paralyzed??? 87%?? what??? what is up with this? i can't find anything further. please help! this is the kind of infor that fuels hysteria (admittedly, mine own is sometimes included. but usually i keep my head.)

thanks!!

[Momtezuma Tuatara]

Francy, the hygiene argument is part of it, but not the whole. It's a very complicated issue, and to do this thread is very daunting for me, because I'm trying to work out how to do it in a logical sequence in a way which wouldn't overwhelm people and leave them not being able to relate anything to anything else.

UsAmma, you are partly correct. The 1 per 1,000 represents people with a genetic/immunological disposition to get sick. If you look throughout pre-vaccine history, the total death rates in any country didn't vary by much in terms of infection. The only thing that varied was WHICH disease killed at which time.

Yes you could say that the polio vaccine might have stopped killing those people, but the 1 per 1,000 vulnerability still exists, so those people were still sitting duck to... what? Haemophilus? Neisseria Meningitidis? Serious measles? the Plague? Sweating Fever? The vulnerability is there. So you can say, these people are like sieves. Plug one hole, but there's still a whole lot more.

So because they've never seriously researched the basic question which is "What causes people to get seriously sick and die" they don't know. And rather than say to you "You have a 999 chance of living, as opposed to a one chance of dying." They don't, because they can't tell you if you will be THAT one or not.

And a picture is worth more than a thousand words. People whove seen a family member, or even photos of people in iron lungs never forget. They lived then. But they don't think about the fact that they were there; and they DID NOT end up in an iron lung themselves, and they don't think about why that was.

What's worse, they don't think about the fact that in the 50's when everyone was running around like headless chooks getting vaccinated that 99.9% of them didn't need to. But the authorities didn't want to "waste time" testing people to see if they were immune, because it would waste time, and also in their mind, not further the vaccine campaign.

Which is stupid really, because by 1958 only 36% of the USA had been vaccinated (Reviews of Infectious Diseases, Volume 2, No 3, March-April1980, Pages 277 - 281 "Eradication of Poliomyelitis in the United States: A commentary on the Salk). Reviews" Dr John P. Fox.)

Remember that 99.9% of those didn't need to be. YET... and here's the interesting thing. In the vaccinated people, rates of both paralytic and non paralytic was higher in the vaccinated. Just as in the Francis trails, placebo innoculated volunteers experience significantly more disease than did age-comparable unvaccinated nonvolunteers (page 278, reference above).

There are many factors involved to understand. So you aren't going to get a simple answer, handed to you on a plate. It will be hard work, and lots of thinking involved.

So let me thing about how to tackle this. It's a huge subject.

[Momtezuma Tuatara]

The first thing most people need to deal with, which I will prove later on with the requisite information, is that the SALK vaccine was a total dud. It did ABSOLUTELY nothing to reduce polio.

You've been led to believe that it did, haven't you. Except it didn't. Your parents and grandparents probably never thought to question why it was, that the SALK vaccine was so swiftly replaced with the SABIN, and they probably never questioned why the 99,9% of people who never needed to get the SALK vaccine now had to be lined up for the SABIN vaccine.


The statistics from the United States Polio Surveillance Units stats are very revealing, (except you won't be able to see them, because they are now classified.... and if you don't believe me, try and get hold of copies of them)

What they show is that in 1955 there were 7,886 cases of paralytic polio, 15% of them, were vaccinated.

1956, 7210 paralytic cases, 16% vaccinated. Non paralytic polio 6027 cases, 32% vaccinated.

1957, 2172 casses p polio, 30% vaccinated, 2,603 np polio, 54% vaccinated.

1958, 3122 p polio cases, 33% vaccinated.

(Remember that ONLY 36% of USA's population had been vaccinated with the first 3 primary doses Reviews of Infectious Diseases, Volume 2, No 2, March - April 1980, pages 277-281 Eradication of Poliomyelitis in the United States: A commentary on the Salk Reviews by Dr John P Fox, and this article also says that booster doses be given EVERY year. The article also pointed out that most of the available evidence for antibody persistence after either IPV or OPV is of questionable validity...)

1959, 5,594 p polio cases 50%+ cases vaccinated which equals 3726 cases, of which 928 had had three or more doses)

1960, 2,545 p polio cases, 210 deaths, 77% fully vaccinated (four doses)

(These last three years were given to me verbally over the phone, by Dr Herbert Ratner, who had copies...)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

For those of you who find the above hard to stomach, try to find out the answers to these two questions:

1) Why did the National Academy of Sciences refuse to approve Jonas Salk's membership application and never hung his photo in the hall of fame?

2) Who was Dr Bennett?

The answers to those two questions will open up a few eyes perhaps.

[Momtezuma Tuatara]

Francy, if I try to answer everything, this thread will be so rambly that I'll never get any cohesive sense into it. If you really want the 1979 information I'll get to that sometime,but right now you need to understand the actual information on the disease, not figures that headless chooks fling around in the media. Remember that most journalist know diddly zilch about anything and they are employed to do "reportage" which means, parrot what anyone tells them to report.

If they did a bit of actual investigative journalism for a change, maybe you'd get to read sense.

So can you just cool it a bit please, and let me develop a logical sequence? You have no idea how hard a thread like this is to do. My floor is covered with papers all over the place now, and I'm trying to get it into a sequences so that I can write a "polio for dummies" which is near impossible to do.

Patience, okay?

[Momtezuma Tuatara]

Francy, I've just sent this through the comments procedure at Washington Times:

I wish to contact David Brown, Washington Post Staff Writer, regarding his article on the Amish for the following reasons.

Firstly, this is not an outbreak. An outbreak is defined by clinically definable cases. Virus isolates are virus isolates, and do not define an outbreak. This has been cirulating for years, so how can it suddenly "be" an outbreak.

Furthermore the figure of 1 in 200 turning into polio is incorrect. I would refer him to: http://www.mdtravelhealth.com/infectious/polio.html
In roughly one in a thousand cases, poliovirus attacks the spinal cord or brainstem, leading to paralysis in various parts of the body, most often the legs.

and better still: http://www2.unescobkk.org/eubios/HGR/HGRCG.htm

D. Charleton Gajdusek,

Director, NINDS, National Institutes of Health, USA

"In most infections only a rare individual becomes ill or suffers rare complications, and that individual may be genetically predetermined, it usually is. For example, HTLV-1 infects 1-2 million Japanese, but only one in over a thousand gets adult advanced T cell leukemia after 40 years, and fortunately only about one in a thousand gets HAM, HTLV-1 associated myolopophy. Those unfortunate rare individuals are the problem, not the problem of the innocuous, or carriers, the other one thousand who die without ever knowing that they had it, and having no ill effect. The same can be said for poliomyelitis, where it takes 1,000 infected cases in order to induce a paralysis, the others don't know they were infected."

That the figure is incorrect is patently obvious from the time that the virus has been circulating with no cases occuring.

The other "fallacy" in the article is that the virus WILL be circulating also in vaccinated people outside of the Amish community. Why are they not being tested? They were in 1979, and it was found then, that the virus had circulated a long way outside the community without causing actual disease.

Mr Brown might also like to have commented on how it was that a severely immunodeficient child was still unable to get polio from a polio virus. Technically speaking, this child should now have clinical polio. Though I do admit that the numbers of immunodeficient children who get polio from infections is only 6 out of every 100 infections, so the chances that a severely immunodeficient child would get it is highly unlikely.

And the chances of a normal child getting it, are at worst 1 per thousand, but in many countries in the past the strike rate has never got above 1 per 2,000.

It would be appreciated if Mr Brown would do a more indepth, more accurate presentation of the issues.

Sincerely,

[Jen123]

MT...
I love you.

[DesireeH]

Doesnt DDT also cause polio LIKE symptoms? They didnt stop that until 1978.

[tayndrewsmama]

What is DDT?

[Mirzam]

Originally Posted by tayndrewsmama

What is DDT?

Dichloro-Diphenyl-Trichloroethane, the first modern pestacide developed during WWII. Banned in the 70s, I think.

[tayndrewsmama]

Originally Posted by uccomama

Dichloro-Diphenyl-Trichloroethane, the first modern pestacide developed during WWII. Banned in the 70s, I think.

Nice. : Thanks for the answer.

[Francy]

mt: deep breath. :LOL i know it is overwhelming. i go in these spurts where i pick a disease/vaccine, and start reading. but it gets so overwhelming. as you said in another thread, we could do this forever.

basically, i'm just confused about the 1979, and 1992 numbers. all i can find on google is that 10 (or 14, or 15) amish kids were paralyzed. that sounds like a lot, if paralytic polio is so rare. so what is the story there? were 1400 people affected, and the paralysed cases represent 1%? in the netherlands, the numbers given (supposedly a total, and then the number paralyzed within the total) represent around 87% of cases paralysed. which doesn't make sense.

"polio for dummies" would make a great book! even my old, german, doctor father (who i thought would oppose my decision not to immunize based on his own experiences) didn't even bat an eye (and actually nodded a bit in agreement)....but then he said, "what about polio?" to which i can only reply, "not sure. still reading. and reading..."

thanks so much for your help!

[kittywitty]

Lurking...

My grandma had polio waaaaaaaay back when. She had some minor hearing loss, or something. But who knows, we all seems to be a little deaf in our family. Anywho, I am finding this all intriguing. Don't really have anything to contribute, though...