Monkeying around with humans

by Jani Farrell-Roberts
It is not only on farms that living creatures are raised to serve human beings. On laboratory tables and vats in a factory in Belgium a giant British pharmaceutical company is currently caring for wild-caught African Green Monkeys. It has about 150 monkeys there at any one time, shipped in from the Caribbean. The company observes them for 12 days for signs of infection, before killing them. It then uses their kidneys as a fertile soil in which to grow the tiny and deadly polio virus. The virus is weakened by transplanting it from cell to cell until it is sufficiently weak not to cause the crippling disease of polio when used as a human vaccine, while not so weak that it will not stimulate our bodies into putting up defences against polio.

The company, GlaxoSmithKline, observes the imported monkeys for 12 days before killing them to make sure the monkeys are not hosts to a certain virus, Simian Virus 40 (SV40) which has been linked in laboratories around the world to human cancers. It was thought that it took 12 days for this virus to germinate so, after 12 days, if the monkey has no anti-bodies to SV40, the company presumes that the monkeys are free of this virus so they are then killed and used.

But today this monkey virus has been found to be extraordinarily present in human beings — it is turning up internationally in over 80% of childhood brain tumours, in over 60% of the asbestos-linked cancer, mesothelioma, in one third of all bone cancers and in many other cancers. It has been found in cancers that kill tens of thousands of people every year. Yet research indicates that the virus was not present in humans in any numbers before the introduction of the polio vaccine.

It seems that this virus lives happily in monkeys without causing any harm. But when transplanted into humans, perhaps to ensure its own survival, it critically alters a human gene called the p53. This gene instructs cells to stop multiplying. With it switched off, the gene that should tell tumours to stop growing does not work, leaving us much more vulnerable to contaminants such as asbestos.

Research published in a major peer-reviewed scientific journal reported that when SV40 was injected into female rodents, every single one of them got breast cancer. This research obviously cannot be replicated in humans, and since the virus does not seem to stay in the breast tissue after the cancer develops, researchers do not know whether or not it is also causing human breast cancers. The scientists involved in this research believe that the virus can act like a hit-and-run driver — do the damage then vanish.

Is this risk a terrible price that we have had to pay for the elimination of the dreadful polio disease that also used to cripple or kill tens of thousands every year? Can the polio vaccine be made without using monkeys?

Yes, without a doubt. At least one other major drug company, Connaught, sells two forms of polio vaccine: one grown in cloned human tissue (as is done to produce rubella vaccine), the other grown in monkey kidney tissue. The human tissue-grown polio vaccine comes with no risk of cross-species virus contamination.

The World Health Organisation recommends three manufacturing processes for polio vaccine:

1 Wild monkey kidneys. The company GlaxoSmithKline manufactures most of the polio vaccine for the UK by this method.
2 Cloned human tissue. This is laboratory-produced in sterile conditions – so presumably virus free. This method is utilised in some European countries and in Canada. The US Connaught Laboratory makes polio vaccine both by this method and from wild monkeys, selling human tissue-based vaccine in Canada and monkey tissue-based vaccine in the US.
3 Cloned monkey tissue. This method is also safer than using tissue from wild monkeys. Suitable cloned tissue stocks are maintained by the World Health Organisation for use by drug companies in manufacturing polio vaccine.

While permitting all three methods, the World Health Organisation points out that the first carries the greatest risk of viral contamination. Therefore it recommends that, if this method is used, rigorous screening and animal testing should also be adopted.

So, why does GlaxoSmithKline choose to use the most dangerous of methods to make our polio vaccine? The answer is that the wild monkey tissue-grown version is slightly cheaper to make, and thus creates the larger profits. It is also that the UK and the US lawmakers permit it to use this method.

Is there any doubt about these risks? Is it possible for the company to deny that it knew it was running these risks in using this manufacturing process?

Sadly, the answer is no. GlaxoSmithKline has long known about these risks. Not only are they referred to by the WHO, they have been documented in scientific research going back to the very introduction of the polio vaccine in 1955.

In 1997 I attended an emergency international scientific workshop held at the US Government-owned Institutes of Health in Washington. It was called because scientists around the world were reporting the presence of SV40 in many human cancers. The evidence presented was overwhelming. Laboratory after laboratory reported much the same findings. I think there were only two government scientists in the whole gathering of over 100 scientists that tried to deny these findings. The conference was also attended by a senior representative from the UK Department of Health.

At the conference Dr Carbone of Chicago University reported how SV40 turned off the human gene p53 that stops cells multiplying. No one questioned his research – rather it attracted applause. Since then research has continued – with another gathering held in February of this year, 2002, to consider how SV40 works with asbestos to create cancers – and seemingly can help create the same cancer even in the absence of asbestos. In August this year another government conference was held. Bit by bit, the drug companies are being forced to accept the danger of the method they have adopted — but they are resisting having to change their ways. They claim to have now removed the SV40, but only the 12-day variety. They have not addressed the issue of the damage they have already done — nor of the other potentially dangerous monkey viruses that can be passed on through their way of making the vaccine.

It is now emerging, as it did with the tobacco industry, that the companies knowingly undertook these risks in order to maximise profits. Documents show that some of the companies involved knew their vaccine was contaminated - and sold the contaminated lots to the public. A recent paper showed that a variety of SV40 takes some 17 days to germinate, and thus is not screened out of the monkeys used in making the vaccine. A leading academic, John Martin, was recently denied access in the US to the vaccine lots he wanted to test for the presence of monkey viruses on the grounds of “commercial confidentiality”. His research has shown that another monkey virus, SCMV, is to be found in damaged human brain cells in sufferers of a number of serious illnesses. This virus comes from the African Green Monkey, the very species used for the polio vaccine.

Meanwhile GlaxoSmithKline continues with the same methods — using wild-caught monkeys, documented to be caught in conditions of cruelty, taking them to their factory in Belgium, killing them and using their kidneys as a dangerous medium in which to grow our polio vaccine — all totally unnecessarily.

As scientific evidence mounts, they must now fear enormous damage claims - as must the Department of Health. It almost seems as if the danger of a backlash makes them defend their practices the more fiercely.

This has gone on long enough. We need help, to stop the cruelty and to shut down GlaxoSmith Kline’s factory.

Further information can be obtained from the author, jani@glitter.plus.com and from her website www.vaccines.plus.com.