“Chemists first synthesized nicotinamide in 1873. (B3, niacin or niacinamide). Pellagra was a pandemic among the poor in the American South. They suffered from dry scaly skin, fiery inflamed tongues and dementia. In 1938 there were 400,000 Americans with pellagra, which was medically considered a character flaw of shiftless poor white or black mudsill scrapings. One hundred thousand were dying every year from 1906-40.
“During the 1920’s, Joseph Goldberger showed that supplementing their diets with milk, eggs and brewer’s yeast could cure them. Goldberger injected himself with blood of a pellagra patient with no effect to prove it wasn’t contagious. Conrad Elvehjem tried nicotinic acid as the missing molecule to cure pellagra, because their diet was dependent on corn grits. The original corn growers of MesoAmerica learned to release available niacin by making tortillas, however it was plain grits for Southern dirt poor.” *
There was as much resistance by the medical community to these effective treatments as there was to hand washing by surgeons delivering babies. There are many examples of medical experts diagnosing and treating illness through their own biased dogma, suppressing alternatives for decades and longer. Polio may be the classic case. Turtles All the Way Down authors lay out convincing evidence for why Infantile Paralysis epidemics emerged in wealthier countries against all other infectious disease trends at the end of the 19th century.
Jump to the chase. These were caused by new synthetic poisons introduced by industrial chemical companies. German chemists synthesized a new dye, Paris Green, that became super popular in Europe and the United States in the 19th century. A mixture of copper and arsenic, it was fashionable in textiles and wallpaper, children’s toys and household goods, releasing arsenic gas like radon. Numerous medical drugs used arsenic for headaches, eczema, asthma, pertussis, cancers, etc. A panacea considered perfectly safe and effective by medical authorities.
Then it became a go to pesticide for farmers, killing potato beetles, gypsy and coddling moths along with beneficial insects. Polio cases rose from rare to hundreds of paralyzed people during outbreaks in the 1890’s. Scientific Wild Ass Guesses, SWAG theories by medical researchers proved spread of the infectious disease was contagious through asymptomatic carriers, flies, milk, food and feces. These polio facts were accepted by medical and political authorities on the flimsiest evidence, if any, until swept into the memory hole.
Lead-arsenic pesticides replaced copper dye in the 20th century, because it lasted longer and was more effective at killing. No crop or livestock was spared from spraying if insects were the enemy. Thousands of yearly polio victims became the norm. These were the most widely used pesticide until after WWII, when DDT captured the agricultural market.
Polio victims in rural areas occurred in late summer and fall, coincidental with apple season. The Bureau of Chemistry, proto-FDA did not test for arsenic residue on agricultural produce until the 1920’s. They colluded with growers to “refrain from creating public alarm” over toxic amounts found. European countries banned American apples in the 1920’s and 30’s. Only “muckracking journalists unveiled the truth to the public.” American tissues became laced with lead and arsenic, the original chemical contamination.
Outbreaks traced to raw milk assumed it was polio virus, ignoring pesticides dairy cows were exposed to and expressed in their milk. This despite awareness that minute amounts of arsenic can cause paralysis and death of small mammals, children among them. Lead is neuro-toxic by itself. Synergy isn’t always beneficial.
Doctors were still misdiagnosing lead poisoning as polio in the 1950’s. Doctors could not distinguish between them without a lab test, rarely employed until 1955 when it became required for a polio diagnosis, along with 60 days of paralysis. Coincidentally the same year Salk’s polio vaccine went public, correlating with a dramatic drop in cases.
Correlation did equal causation celebrations then. Tests showed that only 13% of non-paralyzed “polio” cases were positive for poliovirus. A supermajority of paralyzed patients (far fewer) tested positive. The virus exists, but is only dangerous when it enters the blood stream through leaky guts. It’s been traveling with humans since Gilgamesh.
DDT was marketed in 1940 as the wonder pesticide. Safe and cheap, with long lasting, super predator effects, it was widely applied by agricultural, military and domestic spraying. The FDA, NIH and USDA began testing it for toxicity in 1944 and found it to be a “definite health hazard” with “wide variation in individual susceptibility” that “must not be allowed to get into foods.” Tiny amounts resulted in muscle weakness, spasms and tremors for poisoned soldiers, including flaccid paralysis. Nevertheless, it was not banned. The FDA didn’t even require a skull and crossbones poison symbol on containers.
Polio cases doubled in U.S. children that decade, while an unknown, mysterious Virus X was invented to explain outbreaks among adults with vomiting, nausea, muscle weakness and paralysis after WWII. Autopsies showed the same spinal damage observed in poliovirus cases. Domestic animals and wild birds were struck down as well.
Dr. Morton Biskind treated and tracked hundreds of Virus X victims in NYC, and determined that DDT was the cause. His evidence was both epidemiogical and etiological, as well as logical. His conclusions were “flatly denied” by the Department of Health, USDA, FDA and the military, agreeing in unison. This despite no data on exposure levels by the population, with inadequate testing on healthy, young men, and none on infants, older unhealthy or women -pregnant or not.
Admitting nothing, the Departments of Health, Education and Welfare, and Agriculture began the process of restricting DDT use and sales in 1952 to reduce exposure levels, “especially in food production.” Insects were already developing resistance and new pesticides were replacing it. Polio cases began dropping two years later.
After DDT was banned in the U. S. ten years after Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, production continued in Texas. Markets were made in the third world. The World Health Organization began “anti-malaria” campaigns using massive amounts of DDT to kill mosquitoes. They still do. Farmers were sold the poison on credit as part of the Green Revolution. High concentrations in third world food products, with significant levels in fat, blood and breast milk are found when tested. Not including the suicides.
Coincidentally, paralysis and lameness became an epidemic where it had been rare. Polio vaccines were gathering dust in the first world. Without blinking at their past lies, these became polio cases caused by lack of hygiene with polio vaccines shipped south to eradicate it. It takes a village to dose every child with regular oral polio vaccines.
Sure, many shed the virus, but the disease was almost eliminated, save unlucky vaccine victims. Modern Myth of a Medical Miracle. There’s no vaccine for Acute Flaccid Paralysis AFT, with three times more yearly victims today, than polio in 1967. That’s the short version, while Turtles plods through the long revolution of imploding polio and other vaccine myths.
*Cancer Cathedral: Prevention is The Cure, Stephen Simac, Paradise Press, 2021
Turtles All the Way Down: Vaccine Science and Myth, anonymous Israeli authors, Zoey O’Toole, Mary Holland editors, Children’s Health Defense, 2022