ME outbreaks in the Swiss Army in the 1930s

[justinreilly]

Bob,
Thanks for the link. I have started to collect information about the 1934 Los Angles outbreak and will add this document. I just learned of this outbreak in the last few weeks from a PR post. Possibly the link that Justin supplied.

As soon as I read about the Los Angeles County General outbreak, I called my mom to start getting more information about my grandmothers work history and health. I'm trying to create a tapestry of events and facts that may someday shed light on our families personal history with neuro-immune disease.
What would be really fascinating for me is to communicate with other descendents of 1930s Los Angeles County residents that have similar illnesses. Feel free to PM me.

Thanks,
Dan

Amazing you just learned about the LA Gen Hospital Outbreak recently! It's criminal that we have to do all this research and studying ourselves to even get diagnosed and get the basic facts about our disease (as opposed to lies spread by CDC, NIH, etc.)

I hope you are able to find some descendants of that outbreak and compare notes. That might yield some interesting and useful info for us all. Pls keep us updated and good hunting!

 

[Bob]

I think this was written in March, but it's quite an interesting blog entry on Age of Autism...

A Theory of XMRV Creation, By Kent Heckenlively, Esq

http://www.ageofautism.com/2011/03/a-theory-of-xmrv-creation.html

Dr. Deckoff-Jones writes in her blog, "My guess is that passing lots of human tissue through mice and then culturing in the laboratory for now more than four decades has produced the conditions to enable a very unlikely event-by giving it many chances to occur. A probable place for this to have happened was in the creation of live attenuated virus vaccines where virus is made less virulent with multiple passes through animal cells in tissue culture." She also notes that scientists were "fiddling with mouse viruses in the lab in the 1930s."

The first documented autism patient, Donald T. in Leo Kanner's original monograph, was born in September of 1933. The first outbreak of chronic fatigue syndrome/ME happened at the Los Angeles County Hospital in 1934.

Close to the end of her post she states, "Putting it all together, it seems quite plausible that batches of vaccines containing retroviruses that are infectious to humans have been going out for over half a century. Much of what I've written here has been known but ignored for a long time. The assumption was made that endogenous animal retroviruses couldn't harm people. It's becoming clear that this was a very incorrect assumption."

 

[alex3619]

Here is a list of the ME outbreaks including the Swiss ones and LA County Hospital: http://www.name-us.org/ResearchPages/ResEpidemic.htm

Hi caledonia,

An interesting thing about the list of epidemics at the above link, is that it stops at 1990. This was right after the (then) new case definition for CFS. It has occurred to me before that this might not be coincidence.

CFS requires that you wait for six months for confirmation of diagnosis. If you wait six months, and there was an epidemic, then the epidemic has stopped. If the epidemic has stopped, then there is no need to report it. Keep in mind that most cases of uncomplicated post viral fatigue resolve on their own, and doctors expect that. This reinforces the desire to wait.

A major concern of mine is that the existence of a CFS diagnostic criteria has halted reporting of outbreaks. I don't know if this was intended or coincidental. What I think is that some powers-that-be might be happy with not having to deal with epidemics that they do not understand, which might reinforce the desire to keep the CFS diagnostic criteria and not dispose of it.

Of course there could be other reasons for non-reporting of epidemics. I note this list is much smaller than a similar list of CFS outbreaks (but I don't have any links to one). It is possible that the epidemics that are reported with CFS that I think go to 1998 were never investigated for ME, only CFS, and so it was never recorded as an ME outbreak even if one occurred.

The comments in another post on Dr Deckoff-Jones and her blog re the possible start of XMRV is not new, but I am glad to see the link in dates between the origins of ME and autism are emphasized. I don't know if we can link the virus to vaccines, maybe, maybe not. However, the existence of contaminated cell cultures, now that we think that these viruses can evade level two biosafety protocols, means that all lab workers, even cleaning staff, are at risk of infection. We don't know how big that risk is. We don't know when it started. The late 1920s maybe?

The debate over XMRV or MLV is irrelevant. Show me a population with MLVs, and enough people and time, and I will show you a population with XMRV. The X virus clearly can arise in any large population of MLV patients, and it may be able to spread faster (this is a guess, but there are some reasons to think so). In addition, it is possible that patients with MLVs are permissive to XMRV. Also, due to our blood restriction factors, MLVs will rarely be detected in blood. Ironically, this arises as a consequence of Miller's recent paper, which showed how effective our blood is at destroying MLVs. Alas, MLVs do not live in the blood. For decades scientists were convinced that humans do not get retroviruses, none could be found. HTLV and HIV were a shock. Could MLVs be another shock waiting to happen?

This is not to say that MLV infections of humans are real. We found the smoking gun, but we are still waiting for the ballistics reports.

Bye
Alex

 

[taniaaust1]

Dr. Deckoff-Jones writes in her blog, "My guess is that passing lots of human tissue through mice and then culturing in the laboratory for now more than four decades has produced the conditions to enable a very unlikely event-by giving it many chances to occur. A probable place for this to have happened was in the creation of live attenuated virus vaccines where virus is made less virulent with multiple passes through animal cells in tissue culture." She also notes that scientists were "fiddling with mouse viruses in the lab in the 1930s."

The first documented autism patient, Donald T. in Leo Kanner's original monograph, was born in September of 1933. The first outbreak of chronic fatigue/ME happened at the Los Angeles County Hospital in 1934.

Thank you bob

 

[Enid]

Thanks for a very enlightening and interesting discussion here. (Two friends - one XMRV positive and one MLV positive - Kde M/WPI begins to make some sense).

 

[ukxmrv]

Dr Melvin Ramsay died in about 1990 and he was usually called in to investigate possible ME outbreaks and report on them.

 

[eric_s]

It's such a shame many experienced people are not around anymore and also many ME/CFS doctors seem to be rather closer to the end of their career than to the beginning. I hope they make sure their knowledge will not be lost, that would be very bad for us.

 

[Guido den Broeder]

The naked mice that carry pre-XMRV were introduced in US laboratories in the early 1930s (a.o. Harlan Laboratories). The original stock came from Lausanne, Switzerland.