Dissolving Illusions

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And, for example: “Today deaths resulting from malaria naturally acquired in the United States are probably considerably less than 10 per annum, as contrasted with nearly 5000 annually during the period 1933-1935 (Faust, 1951). Figure 6: Dr. Greenberg’s chart showing what the incidence, total cases of paralytic polio would have been in former years if the diagnostic criteria of 1959 had been used (from Ratner, 1960, p. 5).

Surrounding hospitals were overwhelmed. “Like a tidal wave the plague swept through the Catawba River Valley,” Life magazine reported, “Youngsters with painful, useless limbs, some unable to swallow or scarcely able to breath, they came from mining villages up in the hills, mill towns in the valley, from outlying farms and urban centers.” Orthopedic nurses arrived…and physical therapists …Most had been trained through grants provided by the National Foundation…Iron lungs, hydrotherapy tanks, and medical supplies were flown in from regional equipment depots set up by the Foundation. If you have no medical training and get this far in the book, you may find yourself feeling stressed and frequently washing your hands in response to the emotional impacts of all this truth. In any case, chapters 15 and 16 on nutrition and evidence for natural remedies will certainly bring cheer and relief. Histories show malnutrition and particularly deficiency conditions such as scurvy increased the severity of all these contagious pathogens. Cases are presented showing prevention and cure by supplementing vitamin C, several intramuscular doses of 1000 mg per day. Vitamin D supplementation was often curative for those bacterial diseases, and true vitamin A (retinol, not beta carotene) for viral diseases. One intriguing case found a shipload of sailors all contracting typhus yet without a single loss by implementing the repeated administration of cinnamon. One can actually find similar sentiments regarding polio much earlier as expressed by Ruhräh in 1917:Polio Cases Were Not Reported. Although diagnosis may have been more accurate and reporting to public health authorities more likely at city hospitals, the number and severity of polio cases during the epidemics may have prevented overwhelmed physicians from reporting the occurrence of polio, especially NPP, to local public health authorities…Furthermore, the Centers for Disease Control did not separately tabulate cases of nonparalytic and paralytic polio until 1951 and did not require the reporting of polio cases until the late 1950s ( Bruno, 2000). Thus, typhoid fever, a mainly waterborne disease, was brought under control by public health measures with vaccinations protecting those traveling abroad and antibiotics those few unfortunate enough to become infected. Note that currently in the United States typhoid fever isn’t even included in the list of foodborne illnesses ( CDC, 2016). Whooping cough (pertussis)

The American Sexual Health Association was founded in 1913 to fight prostitution and the venereal disease epidemic through public education on sexually transmitted disease and working to break down the social stigma attached to venereal diseases. During both World Wars they were instrumental in breaking up prostitution rings targeting military personnel ( Wikipedia. American Sexual Health Association). In 1960 it changed its name to American Social Health Association and continues to this day. Various groups developed programs, including textbooks, “to shape and tame ‘the native capacities’ of impoverished children into socially acceptable, monogamous heterosexuals” (Egan, 2009). However] This dread did not begin with the National Foundation. A growing pattern of epidemics—the worst occurring in 1916—had already drawn …notice in the press (Oshinsky, 2005, p. 5). Table 7 (Table 2 in Bruno, 2000) gives the limitations in paralytic and non paralytic polio survivors compared with all Americans (%). The practice among doctors before 1954 was to diagnose all patients who experienced even short-term paralysis (24 hours) with “polio.” In 1955, the year the Salk vaccine was released, the diagnostic criteria became much more stringent. If there was no residual paralysis 60 days after onset, the disease was not considered to be paralytic polio. This change made a huge difference in the documented prevalence of paralytic polio because most people who experience paralysis recover prior to 60 days. Dr. Greenberg said:The last outbreak of smallpox in the USA occurred in Texas in 1949 (8 cases with 1 death), probably after importation from Mexico. ( Fenner, 1988, pp. 328-33) The history of that transformation involves famine, poverty, filth, lost cures, eugenicist doctrine, individual freedoms versus state might, protests and arrests over vaccine refusal, and much more. Figure 1: United States disease incidence from 1912 to 1970 (Graph 12.1 in Humphries, 2013, p. 215)

By 1894 an antitoxin with therapeutic qualities had been developed, and two decades later an effective means of immunizing children became available with the introduction of the toxin-antitoxin. Yet the precise role played by both in reducing mortality from diphtheria is ambiguous…There is some evidence that the emergence of a dominant strain of mitis [ Editor’s note: a variant of the bacterium that caused a relatively mild form of the disease] reduced the virulence of the disease. Antitoxin serum may therefore have merely assisted a natural decline of the disease already under way. During the 1920s …immunization campaigns probably led to the eventual disappearance of the disease by World War II (Grob, 2002, pp. 205-6). Many clinicians, even some who treat polio survivors, believe that individuals who had nonparalytic polio (NPP) cannot develop postpolio sequelae (PPS), which include fatigue, muscle weakness, joint and muscle pain, cold intolerance, and difficulty sleeping, swallowing, and breathing and which occur more than 30 yr after acute poliovirus infection. The common wisdom is that NPP is synonymous with “abortive polio,” in which the poliovirus caused a flu-like illness but did not enter the central nervous system (CNS) and, therefore, neither damaged nor killed neurons. Autopsies, of course, were not performed on humans diagnosed with NPP to determine if there was damage to the CNS. However, there is significant circumstantial evidence that NPP was associated with CNS damage. For example, it was reported in 1953 that 39% of those diagnosed with NPP had measurable weakness on manual muscle testing in at least one muscle group. A 1954 study documented that 89% of polio survivors who were acutely “persuasively nonparalytic” had “very definite muscle weakness” as much as 3 yr after the diagnosis of NPP.In other words, what worked for typhoid, a bacteria, didn’t work for polio, a virus. Polio epidemics, incidence, morbidity (paralysis), and mortality Person-to-person spread of poliovirus via the fecal-oral route is the most important route of transmission, although the oral-oral route is possible. Malaria has several serious complications. Among these is the development of respiratory distress, which occurs in up to 25% of adults and 40% of children with severe P. falciparum malaria. Although rare in young children with severe malaria, acute respiratory distress syndrome occurs in 5–25% of adults and up to 29% of pregnant women. Measles is a highly contagious infectious disease caused by the measles virus. Symptoms usually develop 10–12 days after exposure to an infected person and last 7–10 days. Initial symptoms typically include fever, often greater than 40 °C (104.0 °F), cough, runny nose, and inflamed eyes. Small white spots known as Koplik’s spots may form inside the mouth two or three days after the start of symptoms. A red, flat rash which usually starts on the face and then spreads to the rest of the body typically begins three to five days after the start of symptoms. Complications occur in about 30% of cases and may include diarrhea, blindness, inflammation of the brain, and pneumonia, among others.

Polio outbreaks were smaller than the epidemics of classic scourges such as cholera and plague; but they came into their own while these time-honored killers were being seen off…The contrast between extinct threats and the new curse coming into its ascendancy appeared particularly stark from the 1930s onwards. Tried and tested public health measures were powerless to prevent polio. And this in turn made the sudden and unpredictable strike of polio, deep into the heart of homes that were now safely barricaded against other infections, all the more terrifying. As can be seen from the table, the number of deaths from polio was substantially higher from 1950-1956 than any of the other disease. Perhaps, as from 1953, Humphries doesn’t consider 3,145 deaths from polio, mainly children, of any importance? Note that I will discuss in Part 2 how these cases were confirmed to be polio. Note also from the table above that number 2 in number of deaths from 1950 on was measles, with a high of 683 in 1951, just a minor blip on the screen according to Humphries, to repeat what she wrote: “In the case of measles, the death rate had declined by almost 100 percent. You would never know it today, but the dreaded measles was no longer a major issue in the Western world by the time vaccines were deployed (p.174).” Polio morbidity/paralysis Whooping cough (also known as pertussis or 100-day cough) is a highly contagious bacterial disease [with] weeks of severe coughing fits. Following a fit of coughing, a high-pitched whoop sound or gasp may occur as the person breathes in. The coughing may last for 10 or more weeks, hence the phrase ‘100-day cough’. The time between infection and the onset of symptoms is usually seven to ten days. Disease may occur in those who have been vaccinated, but symptoms are typically milder [my emphasis].Unfortunate incidents and avoidable errors do occur, but these rare events should not be the basis on which to decide the merit of things like public health programs, as some, including Suzanne Humphries and Roman Bystrianyk in their book Dissolving Illusions, have attempted. Even more egregious is the attempt to take a monumentally significant public health issue like polio and, using “alternative facts”, minimize its significance. In Humphries’ and Bystrianyk’s book, the subject of this article, they even go so far as to claim that polio was an “insignificant” disease. Incidence, mortality, disability, suffering: Comparing apples to oranges A systematic review found the birth prevalence for Duchenne muscular dystrophy ranging from 15.9 to 19.5 per 100,000 live births ( Ryder, 2017). During the first half of the 1950s, the United States had an average of 4 million births ( Infoplease, 2018), thus, an average of 708 new cases of Duschenne’s muscular dystrophy per year, Currently, the total number of cases of the main types of muscular dystrophy in the United States is 51,300 with Duchenne’s comprising 8,000 of them ( encyclopedia com, 2018). So, the total is approximately 6.4 times Duchenne’s, thus, extrapolating to the 1950s would give us approximately 4,531 cases per year. Lower than paralytic polio cases; but a substantial number. According to Roush the estimated annual average prevaccine from 1936-1945 was 21,053 cases and 1,822 deaths with a rapid decline following the introduction of the vaccine ( Roush, 2007).