Scientific saga tracks taint of polio vaccine

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The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
June 20, 2004 Sunday Home Edition
SECTION: Arts; Pg. 5L
LENGTH: 930 words

HEADLINE: BOOKS: Scientific saga tracks taint of polio vaccine

BYLINE: MARK PENDERGRAST

SOURCE: For the Journal-Constitution

BODY: NONFICTION

The Virus and the Vaccine: The True Story of a Cancer-Causing Monkey Virus, Contaminated Polio Vaccine and the Millions of Americans Exposed. By Debbie Bookchin and Jim Schumacher. St. Martin's Press. $25.95. 380 pages.

The verdict: A cautionary tale that should find a wide readership.

At first I thought "The Virus and the Vaccine" might be one of those over-the-top government-conspiracy books, something from the kind of anti-vaccinators who rely primarily on anecdote, hyperbole and paranoia. The sensational subtitle made me even warier.

But the subtitle is accurate. This well-researched, well-documented book unfurls a compelling scientific saga and leaves readers wondering exactly what was in the polio vaccine they got as children. Not only that, it's written with the zing of a medical thriller, featuring fully realized characters, dramatic conflicts, high-level politics and scientific egos big enough to levitate Stone Mountain.

The first 10 chapters cover the early years of polio, including material on Franklin Roosevelt, the March of Dimes and the miraculous Salk vaccine, which promised to end the paralytic scourge that terrified mothers every summer. On April 12, 1955, the 10th anniversary of Roosevelt's death, the Salk field trials were pronounced a success and the vaccine was rushed into the waiting arms and rear ends of the nation's children.

Within three weeks, however, it became clear that some shots contained live, not killed, virus and that they were causing, not preventing, polio. A nationwide panic ensued but was laid to rest by the Epidemic Intelligence Service of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, which determined that only two contaminated lots made by Cutter Laboratories were at fault.

The "Cutter incident," as it was called, traumatized the U.S. health establishment and made it particularly defensive about the polio vaccine. Enter Bernice Eddy, a virologist from West Virginia who, beginning in 1959, injected rhesus monkey kidney cell cultures into hamsters, 70 percent of whom developed cancerous tumors. Joe Smadel, her boss at the Division of Biologic Standards within the National Institutes of Health, was infuriated because the polio vaccine was grown in a culture of rhesus kidney cells, and Eddy's experiment might once again raise a flag about the vaccine's safety.

Monkey kidneys are, as Bookchin and Schumacher write, full of "parasites, bacteria, unknown viruses." Scientists knew this and, in fact, were finding dozens of new viruses in the rhesus kidneys. The first, discovered in 1954, was named Simian Virus 1, or SV1. The 40th in the series, SV40, was the nasty little virus that probably caused hamster tumors.

Most health officials were not initially concerned, since they presumed that the formaldehyde that killed the polio virus in the "cooking" process for the vaccine also killed SV40. But it turns out that some SV40 survived the process. Vaccines injected into millions of children may have contained the monkey virus until 1963, when it was finally produced on an SV40-free substrate, albeit still on monkey kidneys. By that time, nearly half the American population may have been exposed to virus-contaminated Salk vaccine.

With Chapter 11, the book jumps to 1986, when Italian virologist Michele Carbone arrived at the NIH in Bethesda, Md. Carbone, a black belt in karate who cooks gourmet dinners in his spare time, replicated and refined Eddy's SV40 experiments, discovering that the monkey virus, when injected into hamsters, appeared to cause malignant mesothelioma, a fatal cancer of the lungs previously associated only with asbestos inhalation in humans.

No room here for the details, but suffice it to say that Carbone --- no longer at the NIH --- and other scientists such as Janet Butel have since compiled disturbing evidence that SV40 is probably a human carcinogen. In 2003, Butel and others performed a meta-analysis of studies that, they asserted, demonstrate a significant statistical association between SV40 and many tumor types, including a higher association with mesothelioma than that linking smoking to cancer.

"As of 2003," write journalists Bookchin and Schumacher, "researchers have found SV40 in human tumors in China, Japan, New Zealand, Australia, Spain . . ." and 14 other countries, including, of course, the United States. Alarming? Yes. And the authors present evidence that SV40 may have contaminated some polio virus vaccines even in the years following 1963. Only in 2000 did American vaccines stop using monkey kidneys as vaccine substrates.

Could SV40 explain some increased cancer prevalence in the past few decades? That is very hard to say, as a 2002 review by the Institute of Medicine concluded. Epidemiological studies --- examining exposed populations vs. non-exposed --- are almost meaningless for SV40, since the virus appears to have spread widely among the population, perhaps from mother to child, regardless of vaccination dates.

Here is one crucial place where Bookchin and Schumacher have left an unsatisfactory hole in their narrative, which does not fully explore how SV40 spreads among humans other than a few brief hints. On the other hand, there just has not been much research on that issue.

"The Virus and the Vaccine" raises important issues, not only about SV40, but about how science can be affected by politics and ego.

Mark Pendergrast is the author of "For God, Country & Coca-Cola," among other books. He is working on a history of the Epidemic Intelligence Service.

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