SV40

We return to 1959 and the pioneering work of Dr. Bernice Eddy, whose previous warnings about the Salk polio vaccine went unheeded, resulting in many deaths. For her efforts, she was removed from polio research at the NIH.

 

For a complete account of Eddy and her story, read The Virus and the Vaccine: Contaminated Vaccine, Deadly Cancers, and Government Neglect.

History, as they say, is doomed to repeat herself, for Eddy would yet again discover something was wrong with the polio vaccine. This time, however, the ramifications would be far more catastrophic, and her subsequent silencing was much more profound.

Dr. Eddy was fresh from her research into viral causes of cancer and her pioneering work in first describing the polyoma virus. However, she soon would earn the dubious honor of being the first to identify what we now call SV40 (Simian virus 40), an infectious agent capable of causing cancer.

SV40 had widely contaminated the polio vaccine, and Eddy desperately tried to sound the alarm. Even though her previous warnings, if heeded, would have prevented the tragic Cutter Incident, she yet again was met with astonishing opposition.

What happened next was tragic not only for Eddy herself, but it precipitated one of the worst medical blunders/conspiracies of the 20th century.

The Health Century by Edward Shorter offers the following account of this story:

Sarah Stewart and Bernice Eddy's discovery of the polyoma in 1957 marked the real takeoff of theories about virus and cancer. It could be destructive like polio, but produce tumors at the same time.

At the same time in the late 1950s that Eddy and Stewart were producing cancers in animals with the polyoma virus, Eddy had sneaked back to the polio vaccine. “I did things on the side which I wasn't assigned to do,” Eddy said. One of them was starting to conduct safety experiments on the polio vaccine in June 1959, from which she had officially been removed four years earlier.

In observing cells from the kidneys of rhesus monkeys under the microscope—the kind of cell preparation from which the polio vaccine was being made by private drug companies—Eddy had noted spontaneous degeneration, meaning that the cells would start to die without any apparent cause.

She did more experiments with these cells, and on July 6, 1960, reported to her chief Joseph Smadel, that when she injected preparations from those monkey kidneys into hamsters, the hamsters got cancer. Tumors grew in newborn hamsters at the site of injection; probably a virus in the monkey cells was causing the cancer.

The story that follows is such a sad one, partly because Smadel himself was a distinguished scientist, not just a petty bureaucrat...he was not pleased, just after assuming his new post in viral research, when Eddy threw this time bomb onto his desk: the possibility of a cancer-causing virus in the polio vaccine. In August he sat down with Eddy, went over her data, and dismissed the findings as “lumps.”

Eddy tried every possible means to alert her peers to the danger, and ultimately decided she would “surprise” a meeting of the Cancer Society with her findings.

The Eddy problem landed again on Smadel's desk when, in October of 1960, she gave a talk at the New York meeting of the Cancer Society. At the meeting she described finding a cancer-causing virus in the monkey cells from which the polio vaccine was grown.

Smadel hit the roof. “Smadel called me up,” Eddy said, “and if there was anything in the English language—any awful name—that he could call me, he did. Oh, he was mad. I never saw anybody so mad.” Smadel wrote Eddy a letter later that day forbidding her to speak in public again without clearing a written text of her remarks specifically with him. That was just the beginning.

Eventually, Bernice Eddy lost her labs. In successive measures she was denied permission to attend scholarly conferences, her papers were held up, and finally she was removed from vaccine research altogether.

Her treatment became a scandal within the scientific community and was discussed in Senate hearings.

Bernice Eddy came to a shocking conclusion: an entire generation had been given cancer-causing monkey viruses. Using this knowledge, she predicted a future epidemic of cancer.

Maurice Hilleman and Benjamin Sweet came to similar conclusions. Sweet and Hilleman were pharmaceutical researchers for Merck and are credited with first identifying the virus as SV40, the 40th such simian virus discovered until that point. According to Hilleman:

The discovery of this new virus...raises the important question of the existence of other such viruses...As shown in this report, all three types of Sabin's live poliovirus vaccine, now fed to millions of persons of all ages, were contaminated with SV40.

Hilleman and Sweet noted the possibility that it might cause cancer, “especially when administered to human babies.” According to Sweet:

It was a frightening discovery because, back then, it was not possible to detect the virus with the testing procedures we had....We had no idea of what this virus would do. First, we knew that SV40 had oncogenic (cancer-causing) properties in hamsters, which was bad news. Secondly, we found out that it hybridized with certain DNA viruses...such that [they] would then have SV40 genes attached [to them]....

When we started growing the vaccines, we just couldn't get rid of the SV40-contaminated virus. We tried to neutralize it, but couldn't....Now, with the theoretical links to HIV and cancer, it just blows my mind.

Further research uncovered even more disturbing information.

This cancer-causing virus was not only ingested via Sabin's contaminated oral sugar-cube vaccine, but was directly injected into people's bloodstreams as well. Apparently, SV40 survived the formaldehyde Salk used to kill microbes that defiles his injectable vaccine.

Experts have estimated that up to 100 million Americans and at least 100 millions others throughout the world were exposed to SV40 through the polio vaccine. [Bookchin, D., et al. “Tainted polio vaccine still carries its threat 40 years later. The Boston Globe (January 26, 1997)]

Even though SV40 is universally acknowledged to cause cancer in animal models, strangely enough its role in causing cancer in humans is still debated. As Wikipedia explains:

The hypothesis that SV40 might cause cancer in humans has been a particularly controversial area of research. Several different methods have been used to detect SV40 in a variety of human cancers, although how reliable these detection methods are, and whether SV40 has any role in causing these tumors, remains unclear.

As a result of these uncertainties, academic opinion remains divided, with some arguing that this hypothesis is not supported by the data, and others arguing that some cancers may involve SV40.

However, the United States National Cancer Institute announced in 2004 that although SV40 does cause cancer in some animal models, “substantial epidemiological evidence has accumulated to indicate that SV40 likely does not cause cancer in humans.”

As the Wikipedia article points out, this is in contrast to a 2002 study conducted by The National Academy of Sciences Immunization Safety Review committee that declared, “The committee concludes that the biological evidence is moderate that SV40 exposure could lead to cancer in humans under natural conditions.”

           

Despite the United States National Cancer Institute's reliance on broad “epidemiological evidence” that SV40 “likely” does not cause cancer in humans, numerous studies published throughout the world strongly suggest that SV40 is a catalyst for many types of cancer:

Innis, MD. “Oncogenesis and poliomyelitis vaccine.” Nature 1968;219:972-3.

Soriano, F., et al. “Simian virus 40 in a human cancer.” Nature 1974;249:421-4.

Scherneck, S., et al. “Isolation of a SV-40-like papovavirus from a human glioblastoma.” Internat J Cancer 1979;24:523-31.

Stoian, M., et al. “Possible relation between viruses and oromaxillofacial tumors. II. Research on the presence of the SV40 antigen and specific antibodies in patients with oromaxillofacial tumors.” Virologie 1987;38:35-40.

Bravo, MP., et al. “Association between the occurrence of antibodies to simian vacuolating virus 40 and bladder cancer in male smokers.” Neoplasma 1988;35:285-8.

O'Connell, K., et al. “Endothelial cells transformed by SV40 T-antigen cause Kaposi's sarcoma-like tumors in nude mice.” American Journal of Pathology 1991;139(4):743-9.

Weiner, LP., et al. “Isolation of virus related to SV40 from patients with progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy. New England Journal of Medicine 1972;286:385-90.

Tabuchi, K. “Screening of human brain tumors for SV-40-related T-antigen.” International J of Cancer 1978;21:12-7.

Meinke, W., et al. “Simian virus 40-related DNA sequences in a human brain tumor.” Neurology 1979;29:1590-4.

Krieg, P., et al. “Episomal simian virus 40 genomes in human brain tumors.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 1981;78:6446-50.

Geissler, E. “SV40 and human brain tumors.” Progress in Medical Virology 1990;37:211-22.

Martini, M., et al. “Human brain tumors and simian virus 40.” J of the National Cancer Institute, 1995;87(17):1331

Lednicky, JA., et al. “Natural simian virus 40 strains are present in human choroid plexus and ependymoma tumors.” Virology 1995;212(2):710-7

Vilchez, RA., et al. “Association between simian virus 40 and non-Hodgkin lymphoma.” Lancet (Mar 9, 2002):817-23.

One of the most important researchers and authorities on SV40 is a molecular pathologist at Chicago's Loyola University Medical Center named Michael Carbone. From the Wikipedia page of American physician Herbert Ratner:

In 1960 Ratner learned that a government researcher Dr. Bernice Eddy had discovered evidence of a cancer-causing agent that she described as a vacuolating virus in the Salk vaccine rhesus-monkey-kidney culture medium.

Dr. Ben Sweet working under Dr. Maurice Hilleman at Merck observed a similar agent in the same kind of medium that they were using to develop a vaccine for adenovirus. The agent was later identified as a monkey virus and named Simian Virus 40 (SV40). Sweet & Hilleman published their work in November 1960 and Eddy published her work in May 1961.

The unused box of 1955 Salk polio vaccine Ratner had placed in his refrigerator remained there for more than forty years.

In the meantime researchers had begun to discover that SV40 was associated with various cancers. One of these researchers was Dr. Michele Carbone, a molecular pathologist of Italian birth and education, then working at the University of Chicago.

Eventually the entire box of remaining vials was given to Carbone in the presence of a lawyer and witnesses. In these vials Carbone discovered two separate strains of SV40, one of which was a slow-growing strain previously not known to have been in polio vaccines and for which the vaccines currently being marketed were not being tested.

Moreover, this slow-growing strain was the same as one found in some types of cancerous tumors. Had Ratner not saved vials of vaccine, the source of this slow-growing strain would have been suspected but unproven.

Not only is SV40 showing up in brain tumors and leukemia, but according to research conducted by Carbone and others, SV40 is being detected in 38% of patients with bone cancer and in 58% of those with mesothelioma, a deadly type of lung cancer. Carbone's pioneering work indicates that SV40 blocks an important protein that normally protects cells from becoming malignant.

Carbone, M., et al. “SV40-like sequences in human bone tumors.” Oncogene 1996;13(3):527-35.

Pass, HI., Carbone, M., et al. “Evidence for and implications of SV40-like sequences in human mesotheliomas and osteosarcomas.” Important Advances in Oncology 1996:89-108.

Rock, A. “The lethal dangers of the billion dollar vaccine business.” Money (December 1996):161.

           

In 2001, the San Francisco Chronicle published a story called “Rogue virus in the vaccine: Early polio vaccine harbored virus now feared to cause cancer in humans,” stating:

The discovery of SV40 in human tumors has generated intense debate within the scientific community, pitting a handful of government health officials, who believe that the virus is harmless; against researchers from Boston to China who now suspect SV40 may be a human carcinogen. At stake are millions of research dollars and potential medical treatments for those afflicted with the cancers SV40 may be causing.

“I believe that SV40 is carcinogenic (in humans),” said Dr. Michele Carbone of Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood, Ill. “We need to be creating therapies for people who have these cancers, and now we may be able to because we have a target—SV40.”

But scientists at the National Cancer Institute say their studies show almost no SV40 in human tumors and no cancer increase in people who received the contaminated vaccine. “No one would dispute there's been a widespread, very scary exposure to the population of potentially cancer-causing virus,” said Dr. Howard Strickler, NCI's chief investigator. “But none of our studies and other major analyses have shown an inkling of an effect on the population.”

Critics charge, however, that the few studies done by the government are scientifically flawed and that health officials have downplayed the potential risks posed by SV40 ever since they learned in 1961 that the virus contaminated the polio vaccine and caused tumors in rodents.

“How long can the government ignore this?” asked Dr. Adi Gazdar, a University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center cancer researcher. “The government has not sponsored any real research. Here's something possibly affecting millions of Americans, and they're indifferent. Maybe they don't want to find out.”

In 1998, after a national cancer database was analyzed, it was determined that among those exposed to SV40 from the polio vaccine, there were 17% more bone cancers, 20% more brain cancers, and 178% more mesotheliomas. Researchers also found 10 times more osteosarcoma rates.

Even more alarming, some research suggests that SV40 can be passed from human to human and form mother to child. A study of nearly 60,000 women found that children of mothers who received the Salk vaccine in the early 1960s had brain tumors at a rate 13 times greater than mothers who didn't receive the shot.

Also, a 1996 study published in the journal Cancer Research found SV40 in 23% of blood samples and 45% of semen taken from healthy subjects. Mauro Tognon, one of the authors of this study, believes this might explain why brain, bone, and lung cancers are on the rise.

Despite official denials of any correlation between SV40-contaminated polio vaccines and increased cancer rates, by April 2001, 62 papers from 30 laboratories around the world had reported SV40 in human tissues and tumors. Even the National Cancer Institute issued a statement that SV40 “may be associated with human cancer.”

Why the uncertainty? Why the obfuscation? Why the silence? In his book The Health Century, Edward Shorter asks these questions and quotes an extraordinary statement made by Albert Sabin:

Was this silence merely the incompetence of the press in the face of a complex scientific question, or was there a deliberate effort to keep a lid on the story? Albert Sabin was asked thirty years later why the silence? “I think to release certain information prematurely,” he said, “is not a public service. There's too much scaring the public unnecessarily. Oh, your children were injected with a cancer virus and all that. That's not very good.”

Today, the SV40 Cancer Foundation is devoted to raising awareness about a potential link between the simian virus and human cancer.

The SV40 Cancer Foundation was founded by Raphaele and Michael Horwin. The Horwin's son Alexander Horwin was born on June 7, 1996 and was given the oral polio vaccine in November 1997. Alexander was diagnosed with medulloblastoma, a malignant brain cancer, leading to his death on January 31, 1999.

The Horwins contend that the polio vaccine their son ingested was contaminated with SV40, leading to his death. Four independent PCR tests performed at four separate research institutes on Alexander's brain tissue demonstrated the presence of the virus.

The Virus and the Vaccine documents the incredible saga of the Horwin family. The vaccine manufacturer unsuccessfully tried to argue in court that the SV40 contamination was the result of a trip to the zoo (!), but the Horwin family had overwhelming scientific evidence on their side.

Tragically, although the judge admitted the polio vaccine was the likely origin of the SV40 that was found in his tumor, the vaccine manufacturer was exonerated because their equipment was insufficient and unable to offer 100% certainty that the product would be SV40-free.

One of the most important reasons this subject needs to be thoroughly studied is that traditional methods of cancer treatment such as chemotherapy may make SV40-related cancers worse:

It is well documented that SV40 binds with tumor suppressor genes p53 and RB. These genes and their proteins are needed to drive a damaged cell towards apoptosis—programmed cell death. Apoptosis is a critical cellular function that stops the growth of tumors in man.

Cell-killing or cytotoxic therapies like chemotherapy and radiation utilize apoptosis. These therapies cause cellular DNA damage such as point mutations, strand breaks, and other disturbances to a cell’s DNA. This DNA damage, in turn, triggers the apoptosis which leads to cell death. In this way, chemo and radiation kill cells (cancer cells and healthy cells).

However, when the large T antigen (Tag) of SV40 is present in a cancer cell it binds p53 and RB and stops these genes from working. There is no apoptosis. The result is that chemo and radiation kill healthy cells, but the cancerous cells infected with SV40’s Tag live on with even more mutations.

This means that standard cancer therapies may only make a SV40 cancer more abnormal and aggressive and less responsive to standard cytotoxic therapies.

Knowing this, you would think that a patient who is diagnosed with a cancer associated with SV40 (i.e. brain cancers, mesothelioma, bone cancers, Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma, and thyroid cancers) would have their cancer tested for the presence of this virus. And, if the virus is present, the patient would be offered rational therapies.

Unfortunately, this is not the case. There are no prospective tests or trials in which SV40 status is used in clinical decision-making. Instead, tumors are tested often after a patient has died to determine whether it contained SV40. At this point, there is no benefit to the patient.

SV40 is a problem that federal government authorities have not addressed responsibly because the government’s own vaccine programs are responsible for the spread of the virus throughout the western world. Federal authorities are so concerned about being blamed for unleashing a cancer-causing monkey virus that they would rather ignore its role in cancer than take the appropriate steps to develop rational therapies.