Plague

On July 22, 2009, a special meeting was held with twenty-four leading scientists at the National Institutes of Health to discuss early findings that a newly discovered retrovirus was linked to chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), prostate cancer, lymphoma, and eventually neurodevelopmental disorders in children. When Dr. Judy Mikovits finished her presentation the room was silent for a moment, then one of the scientists said, “Oh my God!” The resulting investigation would be like no other in science.

For Dr. Mikovits, a twenty-year veteran of the National Cancer Institute, this was the midpoint of a five-year journey that would start with the founding of the Whittemore-Peterson Institute for Neuro-Immune Disease at the University of Nevada, Reno, and end with her as a witness for the federal government against her former employer, Harvey Whittemore, for illegal campaign contributions to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

On this journey Dr. Mikovits would face the scientific prejudices against CFS, wander into the minefield that is autism, and through it all struggle to maintain her faith in God and the profession to which she had dedicated her life. This is a story for anybody interested in the peril and promise of science at the very highest levels in our country.

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Plague said:

In looking at the birthdates of the initial eleven autism cases from Kanner’s report (rather than when they were seen at Johns Hopkins), it is clear that the first known child to have autism was born on September 13, 1931. Human testing of the first mouse-monkey-human yellow fever vaccine took place exactly four months earlier, starting on May 13 of 1931. The second child, Elaine C., was born on February 3, 1932 in Boston. The third child, Alfred L., had the birthdate June 20, 1932. The last child in Kanner’s first eleven children, Herbert B., came into the world on November 18, 1937.

In a little more than six years, eleven children came down with the previously unrecorded mystery affliction and found their way to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, where they were seen by Dr. Leo Kanner, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow. The parents of two of these children even knew each other. A country away in 1934-1935, 198 nurses and doctors at Los Angeles County General Hospital had fallen ill with the mystery affliction [CFS] that made them even sicker the more they struggled against it, like Charlie Chaplin caught in a giant industrial cogwheel.

The tight chronological association between these outbreaks is unmistakable, as is the occupational connectedness of the victims’ families, who were mostly well-educated people in the medical or scientific professions. What else might these two diseases share?

After nearly eight decades, it may be difficult if not impossible to nail down an answer.

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But someone may have known further information.

If Hyde’s claims are accurate, a settlement of six million dollars was distributed to the nearly two hundred staff members of the Los Angeles County General Hospital in 1939. In the last official year of the Great Depression, when people were still sewing dresses from flour sacks, it seems beyond belief that the hospital would pay out an amount that would equal just over a hundred million dollars today, simply out of good conscience. It’s plausible the pay-out was meant to compensate the staff for their injuries without assigning blame. But then if there was no actual or perceived blame, why were the afflicted not supposed to discuss the epidemic?

Wouldn’t that have been the standard scientific investigation for such an event?

Perhaps it’s a further stretch, but could the mystery entity have any link to the parents of the first autism cases? Given what we know today about the ability of viruses to recombine, it is possible that experiments at the Rockefeller Institute in the 1930s to create a yellow fever vaccine, and in later attempts by Brodie and others to create a polio vaccine, might have accidentally created a mouse-human hybrid virus that caused its own unique set of symptoms?

Would scientists today even be allowed to conduct such experiments or were they a sign of more lax attitudes toward protecting human subjects? In the 2006 Pulitzer Prize winning book, Polio – An American Story, author David M. Oshinsky recounts the 1930s race to develop a polio vaccine by Brodie, his mentor William Park (a professor of bacteriology at New York University Medical School), and their rival John Kolmber – who was a Philadelphia pathologist supported by a group of Philadelphia hospitals and medical schools. Oshinsky also addressed the fall-out from this race.

After first testing the vaccine successfully on monkeys:

Park and Brodie next tested the vaccine on themselves. There were no problems beyond some muscle discomfort near the injection site. Then a dozen children were vaccinated, all supposedly “volunteered by their parents”… Inoculation of this material into several human volunteers having shown that it was probably safe for human administration, it was used in children.

“Probably safe?” “Used in children?” These words, so chilling today, were hailed as progress by a public just awakening to the threat of polio.

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The effort fell apart when several scientists, including those from the Rockefeller Institute (who had pioneered the passaging of human tissue through mouse brains) and those in public health like Gilliam’s boss – James Leake – stated that not only was the vaccine ineffective, but questioned whether the vaccine may have conversely triggered the disease in some patients and caused injury or death in others.

In their discovery of XMRV, Silverman and DeRisi found that the retrovirus was closely related to a known mouse retrovirus. But mice and men have shared the planet for millions of years, so how did the retrovirus suddenly jump to humans?

If we believe Gilliam’s opinion that ME/CFS had a pathogenesis around 1934, we might have an explanation. We know that the Brodie polio vaccine, passaged through mouse tissue, was administered to nurses and physicians at Lost Angeles County Hospital in 1934.

Might this explain why only the medical staff of the hospital (and not the more vulnerable patients) came down with this new disease? Just as the scientific community would come to believe that XMRV was derived from prostate tissue passaged through mice, the question is whether something similar had happened decades earlier.

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