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ME/CFS AUSTRALIA (SA) INC
Registered Charity 698
Mailing address:
GPO Box 383,
Adelaide,
South Australia 5001
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South Australia 5007
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ME/CFS Australia (SA) Inc supports the needs of sufferers of Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and related illnesses. We do this by providing services and information to members.
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Polio vaccine and ME/CFS link?
Saturday 22 December 2007
The following is a Q&A session with Dr Richard L Bruno who is Chairperson of the International Post-Polio Task Force and Director of The Post-Polio Institute and International Centre.
Dr Bruno was asked about a possible link between polio vaccines and CFS.
The Q&A originally appeared in PolioSA, the newsletter of the Post Polio Support Group of South Australia (Inc.).
Q: Have you heard of a Dr. William Campbell Douglas and his contention that polio “may be with us again in a disguised form” and that the oral vaccine is causing PPS [Post-Polio Syndrome] and chronic fatigue syndrome? Could this be true?
A: I have read Dr. Douglas’ comments that you mention. He also says polio is “more common than ever.” But I don’t think he means that the three polioviruses are more common than ever, are “with us again in a disguised form” or that the oral polio vaccine is causing PPS and chronic fatigue syndrome.
First of all there is a problem of which we’re all aware: the oral polio vaccine can cause paralytic polio. Once in about 125,000,000 doses the inactivated live poliovirus in the oral polio vaccine mutates and becomes active, getting inside and damaging neurons, causing the very symptoms it was intended to prevent. The recent outbreaks of polio in the Caribbean make clear that polio vaccination must continue and that all children must be vaccinated. The data suggesting that as few as 50% of American children receive all three doses of the polio vaccine is frightening, making an outbreak in the US more and more likely as immigration continues apace.
However, unless the inactivated poliovirus mutates and becomes active there is absolutely no evidence that the oral polio vaccine does any damage to neurons. Unless there is neuronal damage there can’t be any symptoms, be they of paralytic polio, “non-paralytic” polio or the brain stem damage our research suggests causes brain fatigue in polio survivors and in those with chronic fatigue syndrome.
This is not to say that Dr. Douglas isn’t on the right track about “polio” being with us again and that the oral polio vaccine is indirectly “causing” PPS and chronic fatigue syndrome. This is because something unexpected, frightening and totally unrecognized happened after the polio vaccine was distributed. The number of cases of CFS went through the roof. British infectious disease specialist Elizabeth Dowsett plotted the cases of CFS she and CFS pioneer Melvin Ramsay had seen in their practice since 1919 against reported cases of polio in England. When the Salk and then Sabin vaccines brought the yearly numbers of British polio cases below 25 in the early 1960s, the number of CFS patients took off. In Ramsay’s and Dowsett’s practice alone, between 1960 and 1980 the number of CFS patients increased by fifty times. Between 1980 and 1990, the number of patients with CFS increased yet again by a factor of fifty! Throughout the world 32 CFS outbreaks were recorded after the polio vaccine was distributed. So something other than the poliovirus was causing CFS.
What was that something? It appears that the vaccine that eliminated polio had an unintended consequence. The elimination of the three types of poliovirus left a vacuum that had to be filled. Just as a flock of dominant and aggressive blue jays blocks less aggressive robins from roosting in your back yard, poliovirus are the blue jays of enteroviruses, the viruses that live and grow in your intestines. When polioviruses “blue jays” disappeared from your intestines thanks to the vaccine, other enteroviruses “robins” took over the poliovirus’ old intestinal breeding ground and filled the vacuum. With the polioviruses gone other enteroviruses were able to multiply, spill into the bloodstream and enter the spinal cord and brain.
In 1990 Dr. Dowsett looked for antibodies to non-polio enterovirus in her CFS patients. Fifty percent had antibodies to the first non-polio enterovirus ever discovered – the Coxsackie B virus – named after Coxsackie, New York, the town where it was found to have paralyzed children in 1948. Yes, paralyzed. It is not just the polioviruses that enter and kill neurons in the spinal cord and brain stem. Neuron damage, weakness, paralysis and symptoms of brain fatigue caused by non-polio enteroviruses can be so similar as to be indistinguishable from the actions of polioviruses. One Coxsackie virus, named A7, produces paralytic symptoms so similar to polio that it has been named poliovirus “Type IV”. Other enteroviruses that cause damage and symptoms similar to the polioviruses include all the other Coxsackie viruses, the ECHO viruses (which in 1956 were the first viruses associated with a CFS outbreak) and the recently discovered Enteroviruses 71. One piece of evidence directly links an enterovirus to CFS and damage to the neurons that activate the brain. Sadly, the evidence comes from a CFS patient who took her own life. Traces of Coxsackie B virus – the same virus for which Doswett found antibodies in her CFS patients – was found in both the hypothalamus and brain stem, the very heart of the brain activating system which our and others’ research has found is damage in polio survivors with fatigue and in patients with CFS. So the “disguised” form that polio may be taking is not a disguise at all but replacement by another enterovirus. And the oral polio vaccine is “causing” chronic fatigue syndrome by making way for other enteroviruses to grow in the intestines and be able to do damage like that done by the poliovirus, except that the damage is most frequently found in brain activating system neurons and causes fatigue, not in the spinal cord causing paralysis.
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