Polio vaccine danger

Children's illness not due to polio drops: Assam (story from Radiff.com) January 27, 2002

Seven children were admitted to hospital five days after being administered pulse polio drops, while 64 others were taken ill in Assam's Sonitpur district, even as authorities denied media reports that the illness was related to the vaccination programme undertaken in the state on January 20.

Joint Director of Health, Sonitpur, Dr Dhruba Hojai on Sunday said seven children were admitted to the Dhekiajuli hospital on January 25, but five of them were later released while two were still under treatment.

Hojai denied that these and 64 other children were taken ill after being administered polio drops under the pulse polio immunisation programme.

Hojai claimed the illness of the children was not connected with the programme, as they were suffering from diahorroea, fever and dehydration when the dose was administered. (does this mean dont give polio drops to children when they are sick)

He admitted that the health workers were only instructed to administer the doses and were in no position to check whether any child was suffering from any disease.

The pulse polio programme had received a setback in the state after 23 children died in November after being administered the dose, with the state human rights commission holding the Assam government and the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund.

The longer Edward Hooper studied the maps, the more he believed he had solved one of the great mysteries of modern medicine.

He had marked the Central African villages that were home to some of the earliest known cases of AIDS. In a striking number of cases, those villages were near the rural clinics where a U.S. company had tested one of the world's first oral polio vaccines in the late 1950s.

For nearly 10 years, the former BBC reporter had been investigating the possibility that something had gone terribly wrong during the vaccination campaign -- that a monkey virus had contaminated the experimental polio vaccine and ignited the global AIDS epidemic.

It was a theory so troubling -- and some say so riddled with flaws -- that for years respected science journals refused to even acknowledge it. But when Hooper's book "The River" was published in late 1999, laying out evidence for the hypothesis in meticulous detail, the international scientific community could no longer ignore it.

Last fall, the Royal Society of London, the prestigious scientific academy once presided over by Sir Isaac Newton, called the first-ever conference on the origin of the AIDS epidemic, primarily to address the theory advanced by Hooper, a non-scientist who had majored in American literature in college.

The two-day conference drew some of the most prominent medical researchers in the world. By the time the historic showdown concluded, other rival and conflicting theories would emerge -- including one involving the widespread use of contaminated needles -- and Hooper would not be the only one to ask the chilling question:

Did modern medicine inadvertently cause one of the greatest scourges of the 20th century?

The answer will have significance for generations to come. More than 57 million people have been stricken with AIDS, 22 million have died, and 15,000 new infections are occurring daily. And experts now fear there are other lethal viruses out there in the "hot zone."

If AIDS did sweep the globe because of human error, perhaps the next, more devastating epidemic can be prevented.

The Epidemic Emerges

Los Angeles, 1981

In the spring of 1981, two doctors in Los Angeles reported to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta that they had discovered a rare kind of pneumonia caused by the bacteria, Pneumocystis carinii, in five recent patients. All five were gay men. Two of them had unexpectedly died.