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The link between the first polio vaccine in 1934 and the first observed ME outbreak

RogerBlack

Senior Member
Messages
902
<snip>
In the early ‘30s a serious polio outbreak occurred in Los Angeles
<snip>
At that time, Dr Maurice Brodie, a Canadian researcher working in New York City, developed an early polio vaccine that was created by passaging the polio virus through mouse brain tissue as a way to weaken the virus. Meanwhile, two doctors, Dr. John R. Paul, a professor from Yale Medical School and Dr. Leslie Webster from the Rockefeller Institute, travelled to Los Angeles, California in the summer of 1934 to observe the polio outbreak there in order to collect important information. This , of course, meant that they were the first observers of the first recorded outbreak of Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME/CFS).

The staff, prior to developing the new disease, had received the early Brodie vaccine along with several thousand children in the region. This early vaccine had an extra ingredient: an "immune serum" preserved with thimerosal,<snip>

There is no especial reason to blame thimerosal for this.
Various natural infections have been found to cause CFS, from flu to giardia.

The modified polio virus in these early attempts at attenuation is one plausible trigger. Polio already has a well known effect in those who get it, https://www.medicinenet.com/post-polio_syndrome/article.htm Post polio syndrome in some aspects mimics CFS, and it's not a huge stretch to imagine that an attenuated vaccine might cause a different form of post polio syndrome.

Or, indeed that the attenuated infection directly caused CFS.
Pandemic influenza diagnosis for example caused a doubling of new cases of CFS.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26475444 -
 

Countrygirl

Senior Member
Messages
5,429
Location
UK
There are some really interesting posts above, but I haven't been able to do them justice yet as I have had a rather challenging 36 hours that involved an ambulance (heart problems following another bout of malignant hypertension) and the police, as it seems I locked a burglar in with me, when I went to bed. He then bolted from the house. Just for a lark, they seized all the keys hanging on a ring for four houses, (not ones I own unfortunately) , my front door keys, padlocks and car keys.........and turned the lock leaving me imprisoned inside. I heard footsteps in the night and assumed a large animal was stomping around between the space between the floor and ceiling.............thank goodness I didn't realise the truth. Now it is going to be a very expensive time employing locksmiths.

In the meantime, I found the following which was written by Dr Hyde:

The 1934 Los Angeles and California Epidemic

It is generally believed that the first scientifically documented incidence of Epidemic Myalgic Encephalomyelitis occurred in a mixed large epidemic of paralytic poliomyelitis in California in 1934 and Myalgic Encephalomyelitis. However, as a polio epidemic it was unusual in several ways but particularly in the low rate of paralysis and deaths. In the few autopsy cases, damage to the anterior horn cells and the vascular system were noted. Poliovirus was recovered in autopsy material and transferred to monkeys, which in turn were paralyzed. But many, possibly a majority of the cases, were more consistent with Myalgic Encephalomyelitis.

It is estimated that approximately 100,000 patients fell ill from San Francisco to San Diego, a major city just above the Mexican border. What ever this epidemic was created both panic in the public and a controversy in the medical community that remains today. Convalescent Serum: The first failed polio immunization: Medical publication interest however centred around the staff of the Los Angeles County General Hospital when 192 physicians and hospital health care workers fell ill following an immunization of what was thought to have been an injection of sterile immune convalescent serum taken from what was believed to have been recovered polio patients. It was never resolved whether their illness was caused by the immunization or contact with the thousands of patients who appeared at the doors of the hospital in 1934.

Battle lines drew up in the medical community with some physicians such as Gilliam, insisting it was a form of polio. The small group of physicians sent from Yale, thought otherwise, and although it is not said in words, if you read their correspondence, one obtains the opinion that the men from Yale felt this epidemic was a joke and was more likely hysteria. However, the patients did not get better. What is the likely truth? The California – Los Angeles epidemic was probably a typical mixed paralytic poliomyelitis / Myalgic Encephalomyelitis epidemic What we do know is that James P. Leake, Medical Director of the United States Public Health Service tried to prevent publication of Alexander Gilliam’s report on this epidemic. (A. Gilliam related this to Dr. A. Shelokov Sr., then, Shelokov was the foremost M.E. authority in the United States.)

The County of Los Angeles Authorities and the insurance industry did their best to prevent any settlement of the claim for damages. 12 However, by Gilliam removing certain unknown items from the report, and by threatening to go public if the report was not published, it was eventually published in 1938 in its revised form as Public Health Bulletin No. 240. Nevertheless, the battle continued in the courts until in 1938, four years after the epidemic, the 192 injured hospital staff, received a financial settlement sufficient for each to have purchased two significant houses in Hollywood California. (This is equivalent to several million dollars each.) The 192 staff members were also obliged to not discuss this settlement with anyone. However, when neurologist, Dr. Alberto Marinacci took over the care of these L.A. Hospital patients, and some of the patients did discuss the settlement with him.

Years after Dr. Marinacci retired, he invited me to come to see him at his home in Santa Monica, where I met his colleague who had continued to attend these patients and it was then I examined two of the remaining hospital patients. It was very obvious, 55 years later in 1989; these patients were still disabled with classical chronic Myalgic Encephalomyelitis. In the Public Health Bulletin 240, Gilliam labelled the report as, an Epidemic, diagnosed as Poliomyelitis. Dr Leake however states, “the absence of typical histories of poliomyelitis is striking”. So began the fight against Myalgic Encephalomyelitis.

One logical conclusion is the 1934 epidemic was a mixed epidemic of Paralytic Poliomyelitis and Myalgic Encephalomyelitis. This was the later view of Dr. Gilliam when he discussed the 1934 epidemic with Dr Shelokov. They both presumed it was a mixed epidemic. Neither knew of a previous similar reported epidemic.

http://www.me-cvsvereniging.nl/sites/default/files/A Short History Of M.E. Dr. Byron Hyde.pdf
 
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Countrygirl

Senior Member
Messages
5,429
Location
UK
There is no especial reason to blame thimerosal for this.
Various natural infections have been found to cause CFS, from flu to giardia.

No, I agree. \i think it was only a statement of fact.

For me, my view is that ME seems to be the result of a double-whammy that involves a damaged immune system.............organophosphates, organochlorines, heavy metals for example.........and an infection. For me it was a combination of a tetanus jab, chronic and heavy exposure to organochlorines, and an infection that just wouldn't resolve.

Edited to add: I also had about seven years of antibiotics, with many courses of the claimed ME-causing antibiotic Septrim.
 

RogerBlack

Senior Member
Messages
902
Nor are they harmless, if you consider the breast cancer-linked MMTV retrovirus that dogs may transmit to humans, or the Bartonella infection that cat's can pass to humans!
Toxoplasmosis has problematic implications too, before even getting to rabies which still kills a few tens of thousands a year in India mainly.
 

Hip

Senior Member
Messages
17,824
Ah yes, Toxoplasma gondii, the cat parasite that makes women more intelligent, confident and sexually promiscuous, but makes men more stupid. An ideal bioweapon perhaps for any feminist groups planning to takeover of the world!
 
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Mithriel

Senior Member
Messages
690
Location
Scotland
"The first failed polio immunization: Medical publication interest however centred around the staff of the Los Angeles County General Hospital when 192 physicians and hospital health care workers fell ill following an immunization of what was thought to have been an injection of sterile immune convalescent serum taken from what was believed to have been recovered polio patients. It was never resolved whether their illness was caused by the immunization or contact with the thousands of patients who appeared at the doors of the hospital in 1934."

That doesn't sound like an actual vaccine, but the hope that something in the blood of recovered polio survivors would help prevent the disease. It is easy to forget how little was known about medicine in 1934.

My mother had a medical book from about then that she always consulted, much to our amusement. One part speculated that boys came from eggs from one overy while girls came from the other.

I read an article recently, no idea where, that spoke about the first case of autism,but it was a boy. His US doctor called it Autism while a German doctor Asperger was looking at the disease in Europe.

I am wary about "evidence" against vaccines. The real problems with them are muddied by polemic and the autism community feel the same way about vaccines "causing" autism as we do about BPS theories. All that money wasted to no avail.
 

Hip

Senior Member
Messages
17,824
A bit :angel:off topic, but I found this interesting discussion about Hip's MMV reference above.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3181333/

What I found the most perplexing about the MMTV – breast cancer research is that although the association between this retrovirus and breast cancer was discovered over 50 years ago, even today, it's still not settled whether this virus actually plays a causal role in breast cancer or not.

Which just goes to show that even if you find a pathogen associated with a particular disease, it can take a very long time to complete the next step in the research, which is proving whether or not the pathogen actually causes the disease, or plays a causal role in the disease.
 

Countrygirl

Senior Member
Messages
5,429
Location
UK

Forbin

Senior Member
Messages
966
"The first failed polio immunization: Medical publication interest however centred around the staff of the Los Angeles County General Hospital when 192 physicians and hospital health care workers fell ill following an immunization of what was thought to have been an injection of sterile immune convalescent serum taken from what was believed to have been recovered polio patients. It was never resolved whether their illness was caused by the immunization or contact with the thousands of patients who appeared at the doors of the hospital in 1934."

That doesn't sound like an actual vaccine, but the hope that something in the blood of recovered polio survivors would help prevent the disease. It is easy to forget how little was known about medicine in 1934.

It sounds like an attempt to confer temporary passive immunity by administering an antiserum. It's basically taking antibodies from someone who had recovered from, or is naturally immune to, an infectious disease and giving them to someone who has been, or might be exposed. The antibodies attack the pathogen and, in doing so, can stimulate the host immune system itself to go after a pathogen that had previously evaded it. The immunity only lasts a few weeks or months.

Immunoglobulin therapy is based on the same idea but is less specific, targeting several different pathogens.

Prior to the rise of vaccines, antiserum therapy was more widely used to treat/prevent dangerous infections, but it is still used to treat things like exposure to tetanus, rabies and hepatitis infections. I'm not sure if an effective polio antiserum was ever developed.

Recently, antiserum therapy was somewhat famously used to treat Ebola cases. I know this was done in the US, where a recovered Ebola patient(s) was used to provide antiserum for others.
 
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Seven7

Seven
Messages
3,444
Location
USA
Back on topic, does @Countrygirl do you think David T knows this?
Also, I am concerned for his well being the last person asking similar questions isn’t it still on wheelchair today?!!
also I am afraid if he gets to close he will get discredited.
 

HowToEscape?

Senior Member
Messages
626
I'm certainly open to a link with the eradication of polio but when this roped in the Rockefellers I felt we were about a paragraph away from the illuminati being mentioned too.

Conspriacy theories are terrific fun, and they start from a germ of truth. That makes them memetically fit. But they're mostly wrong. Without a lot more footnotes I'm writing most of this one off.
Conspiracy theories are massively harmful, they are like malware for public understanding. They are information viruses designed to hijack people’s thinking at a point where they are vulnerable to the information virus payload. There also a little bit like the fungus that turns insects into zombies; once a person contracts I conspiracy theory they unconsciously work backwards from the theory to filter all available facts, or further information virus particles disguised as fact.

There are still people who think the Moon landing was a hoax and there is no rational argument or evidence you can present them which will convince them otherwise. They think HIV was invented by the CIA, and the people were healthier back when half died in childhood. Decades ago it was UFOs, now it seems medical BS has replaced that line of cr—.

Resolving an issue based on evidence + logical argument and then testing whether results support the theory is an anomaly throughout human history, and it is perhaps now losing favor.

The US government now spends approximately 100 times as much per year attempting to put a scientific laws on magical thinking (NCCAM) than it does investigating our disease. That’s per order of several influential congressman, such as Tom Hayden who never stopped being a hippie. The harm done by denying resources for real research matters not a bit to them, much as epidemics of preventable diseases matter not a bit to an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist.
 

Forbin

Senior Member
Messages
966
Well, what was known as "convalescent poliomyelitis serum" was certainly given to patients in the 1934 Los Angeles outbreak. According to this article of the time, they produced some 15 gallons of the stuff and attempted to administer it as soon as possible to persons who showed the first signs of infection. However, the article mentions nothing about giving the serum prophylactically to the medical staff at LA County Hospital.

I doesn't prove that it wasn't given to the medical staff at LA County, but it seems an odd omission if it was. Also, if both patients and medical staff were given the same serum, you might expect to see an ME like condition in patients who recovered (if the condition in the medical staff was caused by the same serum). Of course, in patients, those symptoms would likely have been attributed to some kind of post polio syndrome and not the serum.
 
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Forbin

Senior Member
Messages
966
The US government now spends approximately 100 times as much per year attempting to put a scientific laws on magical thinking (NCCAM) than it does investigating our disease. That’s per order of several influential congressman, such as Tom Hayden who never stopped being a hippie. The harm done by denying resources for real research matters not a bit to them, much as epidemics of preventable diseases matter not a bit to an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist.

Yes, it's a bizarre irony that the first director of NCCAM was Dr. Stephen Straus, perhaps the one person most responsible for ME/CFS being dismissed as "all in the head" for three decades.
 

Forbin

Senior Member
Messages
966
It was given to the staff. Read the case reports in Gilliam's paper.

Thanks for suggesting this. Just my luck, I went over the whole report only to discover that the relevant information was on the last two pages. :bang-head:

I've attached those last two pages (89-90). The gist of it is that of the 196 hospital staff members who became ill with ME-like symptoms 96 (49%) had received human serum. However, 15 of those received the serum after they developed symptoms, and another 4 developed symptoms on the same day they got the serum. So, 81 (41%) developed symptoms which began at least one day after the serum was administered. 100 staff members (51%) developed symptoms without exposure to the serum.

The report says that all hospital employees were offered "either normal adult serum or serum from persons convalescent from polio." It appears both types are referred to as "prophylactic serum" in the report. So even among those who received serum, it is unclear what kind of serum they got.

I am not trying to debunk the polio serum hypothesis. I think it is interesting. I'm just trying to get the actual data.

Gilliam - Page 89.jpg Gilliam - Page 90.jpg

[ ETA: The total number of cases was 198, but in only 196 of those cases was the serum history known. ]
 
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Countrygirl

Senior Member
Messages
5,429
Location
UK
Conspiracy theories are massively harmful, they are like malware for public understanding. They are information viruses designed to hijack people’s thinking at a point where they are vulnerable to the information virus payload. t

Yes, we know they can be harmful and just plain exasperating and the examining of accounts by PR of some of the 'theories' relating to our community is invaluable and necessary to get to the truth. However, I m not quite sure exactly what part of this report of the story given by a doctor-patient who was a witness of the event and his doctor who investigated the story is considered to be a conspiracy theory.

Is it the involvement of The Rockefeller Institute?

As I am in another part of the world, I know nothing about the Institute. When I first read the transcript of BH's talk, I assumed that the Institute had a financial stake in the vaccine distribution. To me, what was relevant to the vaccine story was that some organisation was prepared to pay out an eye-watering amount of money in exchange for signing a gagging clause. From my point of view, the relevant issue is the compensation, although confirming which organisation paid such large sums of money would help us to understand the motivation.
 

bertiedog

Senior Member
Messages
1,738
Location
South East England, UK
No, I agree. \i think it was only a statement of fact.

For me, my view is that ME seems to be the result of a double-whammy that involves a damaged immune system.............organophosphates, organochlorines, heavy metals for example.........and an infection. For me it was a combination of a tetanus jab, chronic and heavy exposure to organochlorines, and an infection that just wouldn't resolve.

Edited to add: I also had about seven years of antibiotics, with many courses of the claimed ME-causing antibiotic Septrim.

My history looks just like yours as I experienced every one of those things without knowing any of it could be damaging me and i got sick in 1979 after 2 weeks of flu. The only other relevant addition would be the strong endocrine issues I experienced following the loss of 4 pints of blood immediately after childbirth involving my adrenals and later the thyroid too. That was in 1975 so it all ties together.

Pam
 

Forbin

Senior Member
Messages
966
Below is an article on the use of antiserum in the 1934 LA polio outbreak. The article was published about six months after the outbreak began (in December 1934).
Use of Serum and the Routine and Experimental Laboratory Findings in the 1934 Poliomyelitis Epidemic
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1558945/
Two types of serum were used. Pooled serum from healthy adults and serum from convalescent polio patients. The serum from polio patients could be expected to contain polio antibodies, but I think the pooled serum from healthy adults was probably also expected to contain antibodies to polio. Most people who become infected with polio are asymptomatic and don't even know that they've caught the virus. Others may experience only mild, flu-like symptoms. So, even prior to the widespread use of polio vaccine, you could still have a lot of healthy people running around with polio antibodies in their blood. The doctors may have pooled the healthy serum to increase the odds that the resulting serum would contain polio antibodies.

At any rate, the article states that people who got either type of the "prophylactic serum" were actually slightly more likely to come down with polio, though their chances of becoming paralyzed seemed to have been reduced by a very small amount (if at all). There were no significant differences between those who received "normal adult serum" and those who received the "convalescent serum." So, in that particular trial, the experimental use of human antiserum in the prevention/treatment of polio was considered a failure.

Interestingly, the article concludes with a passage about what made the 1934 Los Angeles polio outbreak so different from past outbreaks.
Summary

The 1934 poliomyelitis epidemic in Los Angeles has been unusual in several aspects.

1. The mortality rate has been exceptionally low.
2. The amount of residual paralysis has been unusually low.
3. The percentage of adults infected has been higher than is common.
4. An exceptionally high rate of communicability has been noted, this being especially apparent among hospital employees, where in the Communicable Disease Unit [CDU] of Los Angeles County Hospital, 11.9 percent developed poliomyelitis.

In this article, I believe all the cases that resembled ME were included with the polio cases at the time.

The outbreak was unique enough that the article ultimately refers to the infectious agent as the "California virus," and later as The California Strain. [I'll alert Hollywood.:)]

It does make one wonder if the oddly "weak" but highly contagious nature of this polio strain had something to do with the development of the cases that resembled ME. Other early ME-like outbreaks were referred to as "abortive poliomyelitis" in their day.
 
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