ARE TAINTED VACCINES GIVEN TO BABY BOOMERS NOW CAUSING CANCER?

by Sharon Begley

Wall Street Journal, Science Journal, July, 2002

Snapshots of your government at work:

• 1961.  The U.S. Public Health Service, having learned in 1960 that millions of batches of polio vaccine were accidentally laced with a simian virus (vaccine was grown on minced monkey kidneys), quietly orders manufacturers to rid the vaccine of the contaminant, called SV40.  PHS issues neither recall nor public announcement.  Contaminated stocks already distributed are used until 1963.

• 1999.  H.M. Ratner, a former public-health official in Oak Park, Ill., invites Michele Carbone of nearby Loyola University School of Medicine over for coffee.  In 1955, Dr. Ratner says, he had refused to administer the Salk polio vaccine.  He felt it might not be safe.  But he kept seven vials in his basement refrigerator for 44 years, hoping that, one day, someone would be interested in them.  Someone is.  Dr. Carbone is investigating the possibility that SV40-contaminated polio vaccine made by several manufacturers was, decades after being given to about 98 million baby boomers, increasing the risk of three rare cancers.

• 2000.  Last week, the Immunization Safety Review Committee of the Institute of Medicine (IOM) meets to consider evidence for and against that unthinkable hypothesis.

Amid dueling data, some facts are uncontested.  An estimated two-thirds of the polio vaccines--the oral Sabin and the injected Salk--administered from 1955 to 1963 contained SV40, including the vials Dr. Ratner saved.  Contaminated vaccine was also given to children and some adults in Australia, Canada, Denmark and Germany, and possibly Russia, Mexico, and other countries.

SV40 is a known carcinogen.  It targets the lung's mesothelial cells, brain cells, bone cells and blood cells, producing a protein that knocks out two human tumor-suppressor genes, p53 and Rb.  There is no reliable blood test for SV40 exposure.

Government data shows the incidence of SV40-linked cancers has risen.  A brain cancer called ependymoma is up 25%.  Bone malignancies are up 23%.  Mesothelioma (infamous for being triggered by asbestos) is up 90%.  All are extremely rare:  Ependymoma, for example, strikes one in a million.

Are the rising cancer rates coincidence?  In 1994, Loyola's Dr. Carbone and colleagues examined human mesotheliomas.  He found SV40 genetic sequences in 29 of 48 studied.  SV40 has now been found in up to 80% of mesotheliomas in the U.S. and Europe.  Dozens of labs have found SV40 in bone and brain cancers.  Those, as I said, are rare.  Epidemiologist Howard Strickler of Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, a leading skeptic of the vaccine-cancer link, notes that many studies fail to find SV40 in human tumors.

In March, however, researchers led by Janet Butel of Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, reported that 42% of the non-Hodgkin lymphomas they analyzed contained genetic sequences from SV40.  And not just any SV40:  In several tumors, it was precisely the genome of the SV40 in the vials of the 1955 polio vaccine that Dr. Ratner had held onto, waiting for someone to care.  Lab-grown SV40 harbors a variant genome.  There might be other sources, in addition to vaccine, of this strain of SV40, but to more and more scientists Dr. Butel's findings were the smoking gun.

With non-Hodgkin lymphoma, we're no longer talking about rare malignancies.  This cancer has spiked 82% in the U.S. since 1973, epidemiologist Susan Fisher of the University of Rochester, New York, told the IOM panel, with 56,200 new cases in 2001 and 24,000 deaths.

An analysis of Dr. Strickler shows no extra cancers among people thought to have been exposed to SV40-lacked polio vaccine--or, no extra increase that can't be explained by chance.  Trouble is, with no test for SV40 exposure, it's impossible to be sure you're comparing an exposed to an unexposed group.  You might be comparing populations exposed to SV40 with populations also exposed.  Of course there'd be no difference.

What are the ramifications of this?  Today's children are at no risk from polio vaccine; it's now grown in SV40-free cells.

The public-health risk from SV40-laced polio vaccine is...well, one scientist told me it's "minimal."  Another says "unknown"  Tumors linked to SV40 are, except for lymphomas, so rare that even a doubling of risk due to SV40 still leaves you with good odds of never developing these cancers.

A wild card, though, is the World Trade Center collapse, which released asbestos into the air.  Although SV40 alone rarely causes mesothelioma, when you add asbestos to the mix, all bets are off.  The IOM committee's conclusions on SV40, polio vaccine and cancer are due out by the end of summer.
 

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