by Dr. Mercola
Polio, a contagious disease caused by an intestinal virus, can cause difficulty breathing and paralysis as the virus attacks and kills motor nerve cells that control your muscles. It can also cause death in its most severe form. However, what is not often shared is that in most cases polio is a mild illness, causing flu-like symptoms that disappear in two to 10 days. Often, polio can occur and show no symptoms at all. Even the Mayo Clinic statesi:
"The vast majority of people who are infected with the polio virus don't become sick and are never aware they've been infected with polio."
Vaccine Protocol
Another fact that may surprise you is that the vaccine itself is the source of newer cases of this disease. At the same time that world health officials are declaring a victory on polio in India, they are calling a global meeting in Switzerland on the problem of vaccine-caused polio.
The problem is that while the oral vaccine has reined in wild polio, the wild virus is being replaced by vaccine-derived polio virus (VDPV), which causes acute flaccid paralysis. (Health officials don't call it polio because it isn't "wild.") The international meeting, organized by the World Health Organization (WHO) in collaboration with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Japanese Ministry of Health, is scheduled for May 30-June 1, 2012, in Geneva, Switzerland. According to polioeradication.comii:
"The meeting will review the available scientific information on VDPVs; discuss the scientific, policy and programmatic implications of continued VDPV emergence and transmission; and, help inform the 'roadmap for VDPV elimination' for the post-oral polio vaccine (OPV) era."
Environmental surveillance for VDPV is now being conducted in a number of countries, including Australia, Egypt, Haiti, and Indonesia. In essence, this much-heralded vaccine strategy has replaced one infectious disease with another, more virulent strain… What kind of success is that, really?
While most affluent nations now rely on inactivated poliovirus vaccine (IPV), many third-world countries still use an oral polio vaccine as it's less expensive and simpler to administer. However, the oral polio vaccine is made from a live polio virus, which carries a risk of causing polio. The virus in the vaccine can also mutate into a deadlier version, igniting new outbreaks. Genetic analysis has proven that such mutated viruses have caused at least seven separate outbreaks in Nigeria. Polio outbreaks in Haiti and the Dominican Republic in 2002 were also traced to a strain of oral polio vaccine (OPV) that mutated back to virulence.
According to a 2010 article in the New England Journal of Medicine, outbreaks of vaccine-derived polioviruses (VDPVs) have been occurring at a rate of once or twice per year, since the year 2000 iii. The author, John F. Modlin, M.D., writes:
"The emergence of circulating VDPVs forces us to accept the reality that we are fighting fire with fire and that once eradication of WPV [wild polio virus] is assured, the use of live polio virus vaccines will need to cease globally in a coordinated manner. Because cVDPVs will probably continue to circulate for at least 1 to 3 years after WPVs are eradicated, and live polio viruses may be reintroduced from rare immunodeficient persons who continue to excrete virus, the world will need to rely on inactivated polio vaccine (IPV) indefinitely to maintain immunity."
According to a 2004 report by Neil Z. Miller of the Global Vaccine Instituteiv, the live polio virus from the vaccine can remain in your throat for one to two weeks, and in your feces for up to two months. So not only is the vaccine recipient at risk, but he or she can potentially spread the disease as long as the virus remains in feces.
Fortunately, in the 1990's parents of vaccine injured children lobbied to get the polio vaccine policy changed, and as a result of their efforts, the U.S. abandoned use of the live virus oral polio vaccine in 1999, in order to prevent individuals in America from being paralyzed by vaccine strain poliov.
The Polio Vaccine's Cancer Link
You might be like me and be an American who received polio shots in the 1950's and 60's. I have not been, but many have ended up being informed—40 years later—that many of those experimental polio shots were contaminated with a monkey virus, simian virus 40 (SV40), that causes cancer in lab animals and has been linked to brain-, bone-, lung-, and lymphatic cancers in children and adultsvi,vii.
They weren't told the whole truth about polio vaccine risks, and vaccine makers and health officials are still frugal with the facts when it comes to vaccine risks. Many make blanket statements saying that "vaccines are safe," when in fact such a statement simply cannot be made without misrepresenting the facts.
The truth is, vaccines are not safe for everyone and they clearly do not work for everyone. And even when they do work, you oftentimes end up with more virulent and hardy viruses…
In 2002, the journal Lancetviiipublished compelling evidence that contaminated polio vaccine was responsible for up to half of the 55,000 non-Hodgkin's lymphoma cases that were occurring each year. Such statistics are never discussed when the success of a vaccine program is announced, yet it is a health outcome of the vaccine that should be taken into account.
The puzzle began in 1994, when Dr. Michele Carbone, a Loyola University researcher, found the virus SV40, which had never before been detected in humans, in half of the human lung tumors he was studying. Since then, 60 different lab studies have confirmed the results, and SV40 has been found in a variety of human cancers. At first no one could fathom how the virus had been transmitted into the human population, but according to the developer of Merck's vaccine program, the late Dr. Maurice Hilleman, the virus was in fact unleashed via their polio vaccine.
According to the authors of The Virus and the Vaccineix, leading scientists and government officials turned their heads to repeated studies showing that the polio vaccine was contaminated with SV40, and even today some well-known agencies continue to dismiss study results. This is disconcerting, as the virus has even been detected in children too young to have received the contaminated vaccine administered in the 50's and 60's. There are suspicions that the monkey virus may have been in the polio vaccine up until as late as 1999x. It is because of risks like this that Barbara Loe Fisher, founder of the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), has said:
"With mounting evidence that cross-species transfer of viruses can occur, the United States should no longer be using animal tissues to produce vaccines."
How to Naturally Lower Your Risk of Contracting Polio
Did you know you can reduce your risk of contracting polio simply by cutting back on sugar? The evidence suggesting that a diet high in refined sugar (as well as other forms of fructose) increases your risk of contracting polio is discussed in the book Diet Prevents Polio, written by Benjamin P. Sandler, M.D. The book was published in 1951, at the height of the polio epidemic. In it, he writes:
"I reasoned that the polio virus was able to cross tissue barriers, reach the brain and spinal cord, invade the nerve cells, damage or destroy them and cause paralysis. And I further reasoned that if the blood sugar never fell below 80 mg polio could never result. I suspected that during a polio epidemic only those children and adults who experienced periods of low blood sugar would contract the disease and that those individuals who were in actual contact with the virus but who maintained normal blood sugar levels would not contract the disease.
… An experimental method to prove that low blood sugar was a factor of susceptibility to polio was readily available. In 1938, the only laboratory animal that could contract polio by experimental inoculation was the monkey. All other laboratory animals were completely resistant to the polio virus. The rabbit is one of these resistant animals.
Without knowing the blood sugar range in the monkey and rabbit, it was suspected that the blood sugar in the monkey reached lower levels than in the rabbit. These suspicions were found to have a basis in fact through the investigations of Drs. Jungeblut and Resnick of Columbia University who studied blood sugar levels in monkeys, and through the investigations of Drs. du Vigneaud and Karr of Cornell University who studied blood sugar levels in rabbits. In monkeys, blood sugar values as low as 50 mg. were observed, whereas in the rabbit, values below 100 mg. were never observed. In numerous determinations made on rabbits I have never obtained values below 100 mg.
It was therefore concluded that the susceptibility of the monkey to the polio virus was due to the fact that its blood sugar fell to subnormal values, and that the resistance of the rabbit might be associated with the fact that its blood sugar never fell below 100 mg, and that at this concentration cellular oxidation of glucose in the nervous system and other organs would be maintained at such a level as to enable the cells to protect themselves against invasion by the virus. Physiologists have stated that the normal blood sugar level of 80 mg holds true for all mammals.
The next step was to lower the blood sugar of the rabbit to subnormal values with insulin injections, and then inoculate the rabbit with polio virus. This was done and it was found that the rabbits became infected and developed the disease. The details of these experiments were published in the American Journal of Pathology, January, 1941."
According to another study, a substance produced during the sugar refining process, such as deoxysugars, may be responsible for polio. In general, it makes perfect sense that high sugar/fructose consumption could raise your risk of polio, as it, just like other infections, only tend to cause complications when your immune system is weakened, which can easily happen through poor nutrition (high fructose consumption), stress, and lack of sleep.
So, the polio vaccine is not the only, nor the ultimate solution to prevent this disease. Maintaining a strong and well-functioning immune system will always be your first line of defense, as this will reduce your risk of any number of diseases, including polio.
I urge you to do your homework before subjecting your children to any vaccine. The National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) is a top-notch source that provides well-referenced information on vaccines and infectious diseases. For a full list of precautions for children, teenagers and adults, read the manufacturer product inserts, and get more information about how to recognize a vaccine reaction at www.NVIC.org.
What You Can Do to Make a Difference Right NOW
Protecting your right to informed consent is essential, for all the reasons discussed above and more. The National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) has been the leading advocate for informed consent to vaccination since its inception. Signing up to be a user of NVIC's free online Advocacy Portal at www.NVICAdvocacy.org gives you access to practical, useful information to help you become an effective vaccine choice advocate in your own community. The NVIC is 100 percent funded by donations, and now through May 15th, all donations are automatically tripled. That's right! For every $1 donated, a benefactor will match it with $2. So please, take a moment right now to make a donation to the NVIC.