I had a specific follow-up question/comment from yesterday’s polio discussion I wanted to address. This one comes up frequently and I hope this will clear the air for people who haven’t read my book on polio. Here’s the comment that addresses a common hypothesis: Your “post facilitates the idea that the poliovirus is the cause of paralysis. But this is NOT TRUE. There is a benign polio virus in most of the American population — we have hundreds of viruses in our bodies. But just because it’s in our body doesn’t mean it causes paralysis. Half of cases of polio paralysis didn’t even have the polio virus. The paralysis was caused by chemical spraying, including DDT.”
Another person echoed this sentiment: “I have also read that polio was created by environmental toxins, used heavy in the day and sprayed right on people, into the air they were breathing, food they were eating, etc. Why does polio require a virus? Why isn't it simply due to the neurotoxins we're either ingesting or getting injected with?”
I’ve talked about this many times before, but you need to understand that infantile paralysis, or poliomyelitis, was known to be caused by many things. Both pesticides AND various microbes. Poliomyelitis was a generic term for lesions on your spinal cord. It eventually became associated with a single virus—the poliovirus—BUT for half of its history, it meant paralysis caused by any number of things. Because of this, I frequently quote “polio” so that you know I’m not talking about the modern word polio—which describes paralysis caused specifically by the poliovirus. When I say “polio,” I’m talking about poliomyelitis—the paralysis that results from a number of sources, not just the poliovirus.
We know that pesticides can cause “polio.” There’s a scientific paper that describes an experiment where they purposefully poisoned animals with Paris Green, a pesticide, and they developed paralysis in their “hind quarters”, meaning their back legs.
You can read it here:
https://collections.nlm.nih.gov/ext/dw/101502128/PDF/101502128.pdf
Pesticide poisoning literally caused lesions in the grey matter of the spinal cord—what they called poliomyelitis. Later on, lead arsenate (an extremely popular pesticide that contained a mixture of lead and arsenic), and starting in the late 1940s, DDT, would cause similar problems. We don’t have scientific evidence of lesions on the spinal cord after DDT poisoning like we do the arsenic of Paris Green, but we do know it could cause similar problems.
For some reason, people get hung up on this toxic assault from pesticides and refuse to believe the poliovirus could actually cause paralysis. It most certainly could. And we know this from multiple sources. For starters, for over a hundred years now, researchers have been able to take the poliovirus, inject it directly into an animal’s nervous system, where it will multiply and destroy nerve cells. You might argue that 100 years ago they had no idea what they were actually injecting—which is probably true—but nowadays, scientists can still do this with purified cultures that are known to contain nothing but a particular virus or bacteria. There is no mystery about it. Inject the poliovirus into nervous tissue and very bad things happen. Every time.
And, as I talk about in my polio book, The Moth in the Iron Lung, it’s not just the poliovirus. It’s many different viruses. D68. Echovirus. Coxsackie virus. If you bypass your body’s defense mechanism by injecting any of these viruses into your nervous system, you will have problems. No pesticides are required.
In fact, the Cutter incident, and every other instance of provocation polio is proof. The recalled Salk polio vaccines were not contaminated with DDT, but with live poliovirus! That is specifically why they paralyzed some of the people that were injected with it. The vaccine was injected intramuscularly and because it contained live poliovirus, some of it hit some nervous tissue and WHAM-O! Paralysis. That is specifically why we still see “provocation polio” even today. This year, several children will die because they will be given a vaccine—not contaminated with pesticides—either the needle or their skin will have a virus or bacteria on it and the needle will push that microbe into nervous tissue where it will start off a chain-reaction of paralysis that starts locally at the injection site and makes its way into their spinal cord and brain stem where the system that controls their breathing and heart function fails. This does not require the poliovirus specifically. It could be one of many different microbes. And by the way, this horrible event could happen simply by jabbing someone with a newly opened syringe that contained nothing! No contaminant required. It’s been known about for over 100 hundred years. Look up provocation polio if you’re interested.
I’m not sure why people have such a problem believing that a virus can cause paralysis. Think about rabies or tetanus. Rabies is a virus that can cause extremely horrible nervous tissue damage—but it has to be able to reach the nervous system. You could smear Rabies virus all over your body and would probably suffer no ill effects from it. Same thing for the tetanus bacteria. They have to have an entry point into your nervous system to do damage. Rabies usually takes the bite of an animal, and tetanus usually takes a deep-puncture wound. But those viruses are living all around us, all the time, and almost never cause any harm. Similarly, our guts are likely full of viruses like the poliovirus and echovirus but they WILL NOT cause paralysis—unless they somehow gain entry into the nervous system. For some reason, the poliovirus, like all of the other viruses that can cause paralysis, suddenly gained the ability to do this once humans started ingesting massive amounts of pesticides. It created an environment by which the virus could replicate through the epithelial lining of the intestines and enter the spinal cord directly behind them. There are plenty of scientific studies that focus on the “axonal transport” of the poliovirus. They study how it moves through nervous tissue. Many other studies observe how it damages neuronal cells. Like rabies and tetanus, a poliovirus infection has special abilities to damage the nervous system. Pesticides can certainly do it, and so can certain viruses and bacteria—if they are given an entry point into the nervous system.
If you haven’t read the book, I describe how this is why children nearly always suffered the worst effects of polio. Their spinal cords descend much further down behind their intestines, where these viruses—when given the ability to escape the guts because of pesticide poisoning—could easily reach. As you grow up, your spinal cord does not grow very much and as a result, the bottom of the spinal cord is much higher—out of reach of most of your intestines. This is why children were nearly always the ones that got infected. Polio was called infantile paralysis for most of its life because children were so often infected. Additionally, the problem was almost always on the front of the spinal cord and never the back. I believe this is because that’s the part of the spinal cord that was adjacent to the intestines. They also frequently developed paralysis overnight—they’d wake up to find their legs paralyzed after spending hours laying on their back or side.
Finally, many of the “polio” outbreaks over the years constituted a definite outbreak. Not all of them, but many did. They happened in specific areas and those that were struck down could be traced back to other cases. Of course many other people were getting infected by the poliovirus during these outbreaks but suffered no harm from it as their guts were in good shape and protected them. To suggest that “polio” was solely due to pesticide poisoning would suggest that pesticide poisoning is contagious because there are clear “outbreaks” of polio throughout history that start in an initial spot and spread outwardly or along travel routes. There are also clear incidences of “polio” that appear to have nothing to do with any microbes at all. These I believe are due solely to pesticide poisoning.
At the end of the day, none of this would be possible without the pesticides. The poliovirus or any of the other paralyzing viruses would not be able to penetrate the protective coating of the intestines without help from the pesticides. To suggest they are incapable of causing paralysis is not supported by scientific evidence. I would dare anyone to inject the poliovirus into their nervous system. Actually, I wouldn’t. It would be a stupid trick that could get you killed.
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