Now in the latest vaccine saga, fully half of the available flu vaccines have been abruptly pulled from the market. Better to have them pulled from the marketplace if there is any question about vaccine production, contamination, or dubious manufacturing practices that are not up to standards. But still, this is certainly not the first time that vaccines have been held up to scrutiny.

If you were living on this earth from 1955 onwards, in the US or any other Western nation, chances are good that you received a polio vaccine. A great event, no doubt, when the vaccine was tested, found to be effective, and polio epidemics gradually became relegated to history. But the downside is that millions of doses of the polio vaccine were contaminated with the monkey virus SV40. Perhaps 30 million people were innoculated with this contaminated vaccine, and it has been been detected in some human tumors. The question arises; is the SV40 virus responsible for causing those cancers?

In 1960, SV40 was discovered in the Salk vaccine, and in 1961, experiments with lab animals found that it caused malignant tumors. A huge body of literature now reveals that traces of SV40 have been found in a variety of cancers, including those of the brain, bone, and lung. They match the tumors which formed in lab animals.

Okay, now the plot thickens. I came across this intriguing news on Dr. Mercola’s website. Supposedly, contaminated polio vaccines were removed from the marketplace by 1961, and at that point, injections were being replaced by the oral Sabin vaccine. So no more contamination, right? But another problem unfolded, and that was the disturbing news that the SV40 virus has now been found in malignant tumors in people who never received the contaminated Salk vaccine.

Theories popped up. The virus was spread through sexual activity (when in doubt, blame it on sex!), breast milk, mother-to-fetus, through the air, and so on. However, the question has also been raised, now that certain documents have been revealed (read the story on Dr. Mercola’s site) that the oral vaccine may also have been contaminated.

Ah, food for thought, no doubt.

Does SV40 Cause Cancer?

Now that’s a good question. Some researchers have concluded that SV40, despite being found in tumors, did not cause them, while other studies are far less conclusive and in fact, point more towards a link between SV40 and human cancers. There have been several lawsuits over this, with people claiming that the vaccine caused their cancer, or caused cancer in their child.

Some more things to think about. One of the cancers that SV40 has been linked with is mesothelioma, a rather rare and deadly cancer involving the tissue surrounding the lungs. Very few cases of this disease were reported prior to 1950, but currently, there are about 2,000-4,000 a year in the U.S. The rate is higher in Europe. The rise of this cancer coincides with the advent of the polio vaccine, and SV40 has been found in these tumors. But then again, the world is a very different place now, then in pre-1950. These days, we suffer from an onslaught of pollutants too numerous to be named, pollutants which are everywhere–in food, water, air. We are indundated with synthetic materials, our food are slathered in toxic pesticides, hormones, antibiotics. Our diets in the U.S. contain carcinogens, dyes, preservatives…you get the picture. Any number of things could be responsible for the rise in mesothelioma, and no one has conclusively linked it to the SV40 virus. On the other hand, no one has conclusively, without a shadow of a doubt, exonerated SV40 either.