Wednesday, June 29, 2011 by: J. D. Heyes

(NaturalNews) Poliomylitis, or polio for short, is a disease that has been around since ancient times, and despite the medical advances we have made in the United States in terms of regular and natural health, there is still no cure for this dreaded, disabling disease.

An infectious viral affliction that attacks nerve cells and, at times, the body's central nervous system, polio causes a phenomenon known as muscle wasting (a decrease in the mass of muscle), and can also cause paralysis and death.

"Since 1900 there had been cycles of epidemics, each seeming to get stronger and more disastrous. The disease, whose early symptoms are like the flu, struck mostly children, although adults, including Franklin Roosevelt, caught it too," said a report in the journal A Science Odyssey.

In 1952 that all changed, when Dr. Jonas Salk, a medical student and virus researcher, developed a vaccine against polio that, two years later, was accepted for testing nationwide. The principle behind the vaccine was simple and familiar: Like the vaccine that had been developed to fight smallpox, the polio vaccine introduced a small amount of the virus into the body, which then developed antibodies and an ability to fight off more powerful strains of the disease.

Admittedly, Salk's vaccine logged early success; some 60-70 percent of those vaccinated did not develop the disease. But it also saw some early problems. About 200 people who had been vaccinated got the disease, and 11 of them died, forcing a halt to all testing. Once it was determined that a faulty, poorly manufactured batch of the vaccine was the cause of those cases, stricter production standards were implemented and full-scale vaccinations nationwide resumed once more. Four million vaccines were given by 1955; by 1959, 90 countries were using it.

That said, those early cases were far from the last time the vaccine killed. In fact, throughout its history of use, Salk's polio vaccine left a path of death its wake.

A deadly discovery

Production and nationwide distribution of the polio vaccine was in full force by the end of the 1950s, but between 1959 and 1960 Dr. Bernice Eddy, a researcher with the National Institute of Health (NIH), made a startling discovery.

While examining the minced kidney cells of rhesus monkeys - from which the the polio vaccines were derived - she discovered "that the cells would die without any apparent cause," according to a report by Michael E. Horwin, M.A., J.D., published in the Nov. 3, 2003, issue of the Albany Law Journal of Science & Technology.

Horwin writes:

Dr. Eddy discovered that the cells would die without any apparent cause. She then took suspensions of the cellular material from these kidney cell cultures and injected them into hamsters. Cancers grew in the hamsters. Shortly thereafter, scientists at the pharmaceutical company Merck & Co. discovered what would later be determined to be the same virus identified by Eddy. This virus was named Simian Virus 40 or SV40 because it was the 40th simian virus found in monkey kidney cells.

A few months later, in 1960, Dr. Benjamin Sweet and Dr. Maurice Hillman, both Merck scientists, published their findings. They wrote that such viruses were common in that particular breed of money, particularly in their kidneys:

The discovery of this new virus, the vacuolating agent, represents the detection for the first time of a hitherto "non-detectable" simian virus of monkey renal cultures and raises the important question of the existence of other such viruses . . . . As shown in this report, all 3 types of Sabin's live poliovirus vaccine, now fed to millions of persons of all ages, were contaminated with vacuolating virus...

The term "vacuolating virus" is another name for SV40, Horwin said, adding that later, in 1962, Dr. Eddy published more findings regarding the link between cancer and SV40:

The (SV40) virus was injected at once into 13 newborn hamsters and 10 newborn mice. Subcutaneous neoplasms indistinguishable from those induced by the rhesus monkey kidney extracts developed in 11 of the 13 hamsters between 156 and 380 days...