Columnist Janie Greenspun: Turn attention to questionable polio vaccine

Janie Greenspun

Thursday, March 11, 1999 | 10:09 a.m.

The real danger of obsessing over President Clinton's sex life is that the important news stories aren't being properly heard above the din.

Who can't recite the names involved in the latest scandal? Now, how many heard or read the news about the early polio vaccine being linked to a "cancer-causing virus"? Defense rests.

From the Associated Press came a story of a researcher at Baylor College of Medicine, saying a London newspaper misinterpreted her study of a monkey virus found in early polio vaccines as being responsible for hundreds of cancer deaths. Where are the headlines on this story? Early polio vaccines span from 1955 through 1963 which, by my estimations, place this scary scenario right in the lap of baby boomers, of whom I am one.

Dr. Janet S. Butel says of the report in the Sunday Daily Telegraph, "It is going one step farther than I am prepared to go."

How far is Dr. Butel willing to go?

"I don't think that the evidence is definitive that (the virus) causes those (human) tumors," said Dr. Butel. But she admits the indirect evidence is mounting.

What Butel's studies do show is that a monkey virus, or simian virus 40, contaminated pre-1963 polio vaccinations and that SV40 is present in some human tumors and can cause cancer in animals.

Here's where my blood runs cold. The monkey virus contaminated the early polio vaccines because the vaccines were made by infecting Rhesus monkeys with polio, then killing them. Their kidneys were then used to create the vaccines, hence the monkey virus cross-contamination. The contamination was only in vaccines used before 1963.

Dr. Butel insists, "There is no evidence that the virus (found in human tumors) came from the polio vaccine." She explains that the monkey virus was found in tumors of people not yet born at the time the contaminated polio vaccine was used.

Then how did the virus get in the tumors? According to Butel, the virus may have been spread to humans from several sources and now may be spread by human-to-human contact. It is unclear how the virus is spread.

If SV40 did begin with those early contaminated vaccines made from killing monkeys, doesn't it follow that maybe, just maybe, the use of animals in research is fraught with unknown dangers? Perhaps the use of animals in research is creating hazards previously unheard of, and possibly this could be considered bad science.

Alternatives to animal testing seem all the more critical to our well-being. Some of the top medical schools in this country have already eliminated the use of such antiquated teaching tools as dog labs and live animal labs in basic physiology. Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Stanford and recently the University of Miami School of Medicine are among the more than half of all U.S. medical schools to provide more humane teaching methods.

Dr. Butel states in her research paper that "the association of SV40 with human cancers is currently strong enough to warrant serious concern."

As one who received an early polio vaccine, my concern is serious. Instead of looking at animals, it's human studies that are necessary to avert this potential catastrophe.