AGE OF AUTISM

Tics and Toxins: Evidence Points to Environment, Infection in LeRoy Outbreak

By Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill

As the white-hot glare of attention begins to pull away from the outbreak of tics among students at LeRoy Junior/Senior High School in Western New York, most medical and media sources appear to have settled on “conversion disorder” as their default diagnosis.

Newsweek acknowledged the families’ belief that something physical must be wrong, but the author insisted on “a very inconvenient truth: the cluster in Le Roy is, by all reasonable judgment, a mass hallucination. Aided by media of all sorts, what the girls are suffering from is perhaps the ultimate disease of our era.”

The New York Times, without bothering to name LeRoy, published an article titled “Hysteria and the Teenage Girl”: “Female adolescence is — universally — an emotionally and psychologically intense period. It is during this time that girls become aware of the emergence of womanhood, with both the great joy and promise that come with it, and also the threat of danger.” As evidence, the writer noted that a LeRoy cheerleader – not a linebacker – was one of the first stricken.

 “Well, that’s the kind of nutty story that only happens once, or so I briefly thought,” wrote Caitlin Flanagan, “until more focused Googling quickly led me to an almost identical episode, this one in 2002, in a high school in rural North Carolina. Once again, a cheerleader was first to manifest the strange symptoms, and once again other girls, some of them cheerleaders, were struck with the same condition.”

Though the writer is a woman, the supposed susceptibility of peppy, excitable female cheerleaders versus stolid, masculine football players is Freudian paternalism dressed up for a new century – a misogynist’s dream. (It was our skepticism of conversion disorder that drew us to this story, having addressed it in a chapter titled “The Age of Hysteria” in our book; we will have more to say about its shaky foundations in upcoming articles.)

Responding to community pressure, the LeRoy school district has grudgingly commissioned a new round of environmental tests while asserting “the school is safe,” a balancing act that left many in the community dissatisfied. (The school board this week approved the new tests, expected to cost as much as $75,000. Some parents and environmental groups are pushing for broader tests than are so far planned. ) Local TV stations have stopped airing videos that show the girls’ tics, concerned that might spawn more “psychogenic” cases. The neurologist in Buffalo who originally diagnosed conversion disorder has become more emphatic about the diagnosis, even as four more cases arose in the past week in and around LeRoy. He hints darkly that some of the girls have had such awful experiences that, if only we knew, we would understand – pinning responsibility on the families as well as the victims’ own psyches.

The National Institutes of Health offered to evaluate the students (about 15 total at the school, possibly including one boy) for PANDAS – an autoimmune neurological reaction to strep infection. But it is downplaying the idea in advance. The lead NIH researcher who coined the term told a local news site that simultaneous outbreaks among adolescent girls would be unprecedented and unlikely.

That appears to leave only the girls, their parents and a small corps of advocates – Erin Brokovich’s group, environmental and school safety activists, a doctor who found evidence of strep infection in most of the girls – to push for continued attention to physical causes.

Based on our own reporting and analysis, they are correct to do so. Real illness remains the likeliest explanation with the suggestion that these dramatic symptoms are provoked by stress a convenient excuse for avoiding a rigorous investigation of environmental risk factors . Here are six possible risks that need to be raised, followed by a key question that needs to be answered:

Mycotoxins on playing fields?

In any inquiry into a novel medical condition, identifying significant changes in the environment is a priority. In LeRoy, as we’ve reported, several new factors converged in May 2011, when the first girl was affected there, according to a report from the New York State health department.

That month, a statewide ban against pesticides – insecticides, herbicides, fungicides -- took effect for every school in the state. The ban coincided with the rainiest spring ever in Buffalo and the second rainiest in Rochester – LeRoy is located between them -- followed by more downpours in late summer. One of the warmest winters on record has followed.

The school district confirmed last week that it “has not applied pesticides to any of the high school athletic fields since September 2010.”

That month, a product called Turf Herbicide was “used to spray broadleaf weeds on varsity football and soccer field.” In summer 2009, Roundup Weed killer was used in mulch beds, but not in 2010. (The law banning pesticides was passed in April 2010 and may have affected spraying that summer.)

This probably explains the orange substance that cropped up on playing fields at the school last year – so thick that it coated students’ shoes and clothes, so widespread some thought it was pesticide sprayed from an airplane. Officials said it was a harmless grass fungus called rust. Ironically, these fungal outbeaks may point to a counterintuitive new development: the complete and sudden absence of pesticides on school grounds.

Based on that and a history of flooding and water problems at the school, which is partly sited on a FEMA flood hazard area and wetlands, we speculated that harmful metabolites of a fungus – otherwise known as a mycotoxin -- might also have gained a foothold. One possibility:  ergot alkaloids, toxic products of fungi that can grow on rye and other grasses. We told the story of a man in the village of Bath, about 70 miles from LeRoy, who developed similar symptoms last September. He lives next to a field that was planted last summer in ryegrass and not harvested, adjacent to a swamp and a levee. He draws his water from a well in the back yard.

Since then, local news outlets have spoken to experts debunking the possibility of mycotoxins, but no specific tests have been done. (For Leroy a Fungal Theory and Expert Doesn't Buy Ergot Theory.)

In December, the school district tested several places inside the school for mold spores and found none, although they did not do “destructive” tests – cutting open walls and the like – to look for hidden sources. Many experts say that it is the only way to completely rule out mold. They also did one test of the air outside the building – location not given – as a “control” to see if inside readings were higher.

One negative test was for a fungus called a. fumigatus, which can produce ergot alkaloids. A June 2005 study in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology found, according to its title, “Abundant Respirable Ergot Alkaloids From the Common Airborne Fungus Aspergillus Fumigatus.”

“Ergot alkaloids are mycotoxins that interact with several monoamine receptors, negatively affecting cardiovascular, nervous, reproductive, and immune systems of exposed humans and animals,” the report said. The alkaloids develop in especially high quantities on maize (corn) and latex paint, according to the study. In a comparison chart, ergot alkaloid production was far higher in latex paint than in any other medium.

That is intriguing because one substance the LeRoy school sprays annually on its grounds is white latex paint, to create the lines that mark playing fields. In the buildings and grounds report, the district said it has used Super Stripe Athletic Paint and Field Marking Paint, two latex brands, every year including 2011.

That might offer an alternative explanation for the Cheerleader Syndrome others have noted. Simply put, cheerleaders spend their time on the sidelines. (And they wear fewer clothes than running backs.) At LeRoy, four of the first 12 girls affected were cheerleaders and two were soccer players, according to the state health department report. In the 2002 North Carolina cluster cited in the Times article, five of the 10 students were current or former cheerleaders.

Tics and Toxins: Pesticide Ban, Rainfall Could Point to Poisonous Fungus as Factor in Student Outbreaks

By Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill

LEROY, N.Y., February 6  -- Last year, during the wettest spring ever recorded across large swaths of New York state, a little-noticed law took effect: As of May 18, pesticide use was banned from the grounds of every school in the state. That same month, a girl at the junior/senior high school here, and another at a high school near Albany, developed a mysterious tic disorder. The total number of cases in LeRoy has now risen to 15.

This convergence adds a new possibility to the list of suspects already being scrutinized in this picturesque Western New York village of 4,400, suspects that range from a 1970 train derailment that spewed toxic chemicals, to an autoimmune disorder called PANDAS, to leaks from gas wells on school grounds that may or may not have employed “fracking." The new possibility: Poisoning from a fungus that grows on a grass commonly planted on school grounds.

The fungus is called ergot, and it can grow when ryegrass – used on most athletic playing fields – sprouts a floweret that gets infected. That most often happens during wet spring months and on low-lying or marshy areas. (This photo was taken on school grounds last week.)

Two other tic cases have been reported in girls who attend Corinth High School, north of Albany. Both are members of the school softball team; the first girl collapsed unconscious in May during the first inning of a softball game and began twitching and convulsing, according to the Albany Times-Union; in LeRoy, at least 6 of the first 12 cases were among athletically active girls – four cheerleaders and two members of the soccer team.

And as we have reported, a 35-year-old man in the village of Bath, about 70 miles from LeRoy, was stricken with the same symptoms in September. He lives close to a field that was planted last spring in rye and not harvested; there is a swamp and a levee nearby; and his water comes from a well in his yard. (This is a photo of the swamp.)

In Corinth, the first girl was affected in May; according to a report from the New York State Department of Health released Friday, the first case in LeRoy was also in May, followed by three more cases in weeks that began in September, two cases in October, one case in November, and one case in December. The state report dismissed environmental or infectious factors and embraced the official diagnosis of “conversion disorder,” in which stress or trauma are subconsciously converted into physical symptoms (several cases at once is called “a mass psychogenic event”).

Tics and Toxins: Similar Case in County Near LeRoy May Point to Environment

By Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill

BATH, N.Y., February 3 – “I’ve always been a fighter,” Bryan Tremblay says, and that’s not just a metaphor. Now 35 but still a slight 112 pounds at 5 foot 1, he was a bully magnet as a child and learned early to defend himself. That was an advantage when he wrestled for his high school team.

But now Tremblay, who lives in the Steuben County village of Bath in the Finger Lakes region, is battling a demon he can’t control. Since September, he’s suffered from a major tic disorder. It goes on, unpredictably, for hours a day. Even on three heavy-duty medicines, he has seizure-like episodes that leave him sitting dazed for half an hour.

 

The disorder keeps him at home. It makes it hard to study for his online degree in graphic design from the Art Institute of Pittsburgh – and well-nigh impossible to look for work after being laid off early last year from his job at a furniture factory. It creates inevitable fears for his health, his wife, his future.

“It’s so frustrating,” he says. “I just want an answer to what I’ve got.”

Whatever Bryan Tremblay’s got is remarkably similar to the tic-like illnesses that have afflicted 15 students at LeRoy Junior/Senior High School about 70 miles away. Many of the LeRoy students, all but one a girl, came down with the disorder about the same time Tremblay did (he didn’t hear about that until much later). Most were diagnosed with “conversion disorder,” and since so many cases were involved, medical experts have declared it a “mass psychogenic event,” in which stress or trauma is supposedly converted unconsciously into physical symptoms and spreads among affinity groups. School and state health officials say they’ve ruled out environmental or infectious causes and insisted again on Wednesday that the school the girls attend “is safe.”

No one is suggesting conversion disorder in Tremblay’s illness. No one he knows has anything like it. Extensive neurological workups have turned up nothing. He’s due for another follow-up in a couple of weeks at the University of Rochester Medical Center. Tremblay doesn’t drink or use prescription or recreational drugs, nor has he been to LeRoy.

He is no publicity seeker. His sister mentioned his situation in a comment on a story we wrote about LeRoy. She gave us his contact information when we asked, and we reached out to Tremblay.

In an e-mail, he responded: “The symptoms seemed to appear almost out of thin air. It started with uncontrollable body spasms and convulsions in my mid to upper body area. These convulsions lasted from approximately 15 minutes to a 30 minute span.

“Soon the spasms started moving to my head and neck area and the movement was similar to a strong neck-whip similar to that of whiplash, sharp and strong and completely random. I did seem to notice that the amount of stress was a factor in the strength of the tics. The problem is the stress level increases once it starts and the tics become stronger and increase as well.

“I noticed that after five months the tics have become vocal, more yelling and humming with points of time where I repeat noises over and over. I find myself spacing out for large amounts of time and daydreaming with difficulty recovering.

“I have also started hand and arm movements.”

In almost every way, Tremblay’s life circumstances could not be more different from the LeRoy cases. But one common factor was evident during a visit – water. Water everywhere. Tremblay lives in a low-lying area. His house backs up to a levee less than a football field’s length behind his house.

Tics and Toxins: Leroy Put Student Playing Fields on FEMA Flood Hazard Land

By Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill

LEROY, N.Y., February 2 – School officials who say environmental factors can’t be responsible for the outbreak of tics at the Junior/Senior High School might want to check last year’s record rainfalls – and the flood-prone ground right under their feet.

The tics broke out after an unusual pattern of heavy rain, followed by a mild winter that has kept the ground from freezing and left lots of standing water at Leroy Junior/Senior High School.

That should be no surprise. Part of the school grounds -- including athletic fields -- are right on top of a federally designated FEMA Flood Hazard Area. While a county official told us that the school itself sits on a slope just above the hazard area, the zone cuts right across the girls’ softball diamond, as well as the football/track field and another, larger baseball field.

The land in the flood hazard area generally correlates with other mapping that shows less optimal and more flood prone Canandaigua soil covering the site.

In fact, we’ve been told by local residents that some fields, including the girls’ softball field just built in 2009, had to be dug up and rebuilt within the last year because the ground was so wet. The building itself has not escaped water and structural woes – the gym could not be used when the school was first opened a few years back because the floor buckled and sank, and the opening of school was delayed one year for a week by flooding, according to a former student.

School officials won’t comment, but Superintendent Kim M. Cox issued a new statement Wednesday, mostly blasting national press attention and the involvement of famed advocate Erin Brockovich, who has cited a train derailment of hazardous material a few miles from town in 1970 as a likely cause. Cox said new tests have shown drinking water inside the school – which comes from neighboring Monroe County – is safe.

Citing state and federal experts, she said: “All of these agencies and professionals from these agencies have assured us that our school is safe. There is no evidence of an environmental or infectious cause. Environmental causes would not discriminate. We would see a wide range of people affected.”

But no one seems to be looking up at the sky or down at the ground. LeRoy, like other New York state and Northeastern U.S. locations, has seen an epic amount of rain during the past 12 months. We put this chart together to show 2011 rainfall versus normal amounts in Buffalo and Rochester. LeRoy is located between them.

Tics and Toxins: Leroy School Site has History of Health, Water, Building Woes

By Dan Olmsted

The school where 12 girls developed tics attributed to "conversion disorder" has a history of water and structural problems, and an outbreak of rashes and sores occurred among students playing sports on land where the school is now sitting, according to a student who went there.

 "When we first started we couldn't go to gym class because the floor kept sinking and cracking," said the student, who attended the new LeRoy Junior/Senior High School in 2005, its first year of operation. She was one of several people who described the site as a "swamp." 

One year, students had to start a week late because of flooding inside the building, she said.

Before the current school -- which goes from eighth to twelfth grades -- was built, the site was used for student playing fields; the school itself was at another location. The new building sits directly atop those playing fields.

In the 1970s, students using those fields suffered from open sores that would not heal and rashes, said the former student, whose mother also went there and recalled the incident. The soil was tested, the cause was found, the students were treated and recovered. She did not know what the tests had shown.

This student expressed surprise that two consultant reports commissioned by the district, which found no problems with indoor air quality or toxins in the school building, stated: "No history of building water damage or site contamination was found."

She is not alone. On a Facebook site set up to support the students, one commenter wrote: "I read the environmental report and it seems like the testing wasn't very thorough. ... Correct me if I am wrong but wasn't the school partially underwater when it was first built? And how about soil testing. It seems like that would be included in thorough environmental testing? These girls deserve some answers. Praying for all of them and hoping we all get some answers soon."

Last week, I reported that except for checking a log of pesticide spraying, there is no evidence the consultants considered toxins in the schoolyard or on playing fields. Yet the symptoms occurred during mild weather when students would have been outside, and the school grounds are surrounded by intensively farmed land from which chemicals could conceivably have seeped or drifted.

The school is required to keep annual pesticide logs that were reviewed by the consulting firm, and therefore pesticides were ruled out. As best I could determine, that’s as far as it went.

The former student told me that some outside areas are used exclusively by girls, including a softball diamond.

Conversion disorder is a psychogenic diagnosis that means a psychological issue, such as stress or trauma, is converted unconsciously into physical symptoms. Several parents and affected students say they don’t accept that explanation. According to press reports, they have lost confidence in the Buffalo clinic that made the diagnosis and are now seeking other doctors to examine their children; the Buffalo clinic has reportedly now offered to conduct more tests.

One press report says the total number of students affected has reached 16 and includes one boy.

Neither the district nor the consulting firm it hired would talk to me about the issue.

On Friday, Jeffrey Hammond, a spokesman for the state Department of Health, told me, "The school is safe. The environment or an infection is not the cause of the students’ tics. There are many causes of tics-like symptoms. Stress can often worsen tic-like symptoms.

“All of the affected students have been evaluated and some have shown signs of improvement. Vaccines (Gardasil) have been ruled out."

--

Dan Olmsted is Editor of Age of Autism and co-author, with Mark Blaxill, of "The Age of Autism -- Mercury, Medicine, and a Man-Made Disorder." He has been an editor and reporter at USA Today and United Press International, where his investigation of severe side effects of an antimalaria drug given to U.S. soldiers won Best Wire Service Reporting from the National Mental Health Association.

From the Editor: Making waves

David Kirby's next book, "Death at Sea World," isn't out till July but already there are two petitions against it. You know, don't buy it, don't read it, don't believe it. Kinda familiar, eh?

 

An Elaborate Fraud, Part 8: In Which The British Medical Journal Tries to Debunk a Clear-Cut Case of Regressive Autism

One of the 12 children on a doctor visit not long after the BMJ articles were published in January.

By Dan Olmsted

In its attack on Dr. Andrew Wakefield in January, The British Medical Journal said he “manufactured” data to fabricate a link between the measles-mumps-rubella shot and the onset of autism in 12 children, setting off a worldwide vaccine scare.

Author Brian Deer questioned whether the children even had the disorder. If they did not, of course, that would be a devastating blow to Wakefield’s work. “First to crack was ‘regressive autism,’ the bedrock of his allegations,” wrote Deer, based on his seven-year investigation of Wakefield’s 1998 report. Just one child -- Case 2 -- clearly had regressive autism, he asserted.

But that charge is false. Take Child 11, whose circumstances we described in the last article in this series. Child 11 clearly had regressive autism – just as he clearly developed autism after the MMR shot, not before it, as Deer falsely reported in the BMJ (see HERE).

Once again, only Brian Deer claims otherwise.

--

When I first spoke to Father 11 earlier this year, it was by phone. I had dropped off a copy of my book at the guard’s entrance to his gated enclave in Southern California, with a note on the back of my business card that I was interviewing families of the 12 children described in Wakefield’s Lancet paper, and would like to speak with him while I was in the area.

He called the next morning.

“My son was diagnosed in 1994,” he told me. Until 15 months, “my son was a healthy young baby, and after he was given the MMR he came down with otitis media (an ear infection) and later came down with pneumonia. He was just slowly regressing, after several months. It was almost unnoticeable.”

The father and I arranged to meet about an hour later at a coffee shop nearby. At this point he hadn’t read Deer’s article and wasn’t aware of its contents – he was just unguardedly describing what happened to his son. He showed me a letter he had written to Wakefield at the Royal Free Hospital in London in 1997 that confirmed what he told me.

“My son Vahe at age 15 months, was immunized with the Merck MMR vaccine and became ill for the next several months. As his pediatric records indicate he came down with a viral infection, and shortly thereafter viral pneumonia. His condition slowly deteriorated over time, and was diagnosed as being autistic at age 3. The onset of his autistic-like behaviors began around 18 months.”

An Elaborate Fraud Series Part 7: In Which the BMJ’s Prime Example of Wakefield’s Alleged Misconduct Proves Flagrantly False

One of the 12 children on a doctor visit not long after the BMJ articles were published in January.

By Dan Olmsted

In January, The British Medical Journal began its attack on Dr. Andrew Wakefield by claiming he altered every single one of 12 children's case histories to create a phony link between the MMR vaccine and autism. In five cases, it said, signs of autism actually began before the shot was even given.

As the strongest case in point, author Brian Deer described how  Child 11's symptoms appeared “too soon” -- a full two months before the measles-mumps-rubella shot. Deer said the father himself spotted the "anomaly" and was deeply upset about Wakefield's deception.

But none of that is true.

Child 11’s measles-mumps-rubella shot came first, and the symptoms of physical illness and regression followed, just as Wakefield reported. No one but Deer claims otherwise. Multiple records by independent medical experts establish the facts, the child’s father confirms them, and BMJ Editor Fiona Godlee and Deer have known it for months – because I told them about it and showed them the evidence, and so did the father.

Yet Godlee has refused to correct that error and numerous others of similar significance, continuing to publicly insist there were none.

This is the strange counter-factual universe into which the British medical establishment has plunged the controversy over autism and vaccines. The BMJ’s Wakefield investigation – despite peer-review and supposedly rigorous fact-checking – is replete with the kind of misrepresentations, elisions and outright falsehoods it charges Wakefield with committing.

To date, installments in our series have examined the BMJ’s failure to adhere to its own standards of confidentiality and fairness, as well as tactics employed by Deer, whom it commissioned to investigate Wakefield – tactics that included “blagging,” or using a false identity, to interview parents of vaccine-damaged children for The Sunday Times of London, where most of the material later reported in the BMJ first appeared. (In the wake of the News International scandal, the Murdoch-owned Sunday Times has now banned blagging, although Deer said he remains “immensely proud” of his reporting techniques.)

We now turn to the elements of fraud alleged by Deer and the BMJ. We begin, as the journal did, with Child 11. None of the children were named in the original 1998 Lancet article written by Wakefield and 12 co-authors. Like Deer, I was able to determine the families’ identities but – unlike Deer, whose reporting was limited and selective – I reached out to every one I could find, and in every case heard a very different account from the one Deer reported.

--

I met Father 11 at a Peet’s Coffee shop in an affluent, picture-perfect Southern California enclave, and we sat outside in the mid-60s sunshine he jokingly called “a little frosty.” A wealthy businessman who lives in a gated community nearby, he wore a light jacket emblazoned with “Cal,” for the University of California at Berkeley where he got an engineering degree. He carried a thin file folder and a spiral notebook.

In this laid-back setting, it was hard to grasp the role he and his family have played in one of the major medical controversies of our time, one that unfolded in a foggy city 6,000 miles to the east.

This father is Deer’s best witness among the parents of the 12 children described in the Lancet paper – in fact, his only one, the lone parent who is hostile to Wakefield, not just a little frosty, but coldly angry. His anonymous comments to Deer in the BMJ seemed to fully support the January 5, 2011, cover story: “Secrets of the MMR Scare: How the Case Against the MMR Was Fixed.”

“The father need not have worried,” Deer continued. “My investigation of the MMR issue exposed the frauds behind Wakefield’s research.”

Child 11, in fact, was Deer’s opening.

From the Editor: Delete me!

Folks, I inadvertently deleted several comments on Jake's story. So sorry. It wasn't the bad guys, just the dumb one. -- Dan

The Age of Polio: How an Old Virus and New Toxins Triggered a Man-Made Epidemic

(Managing Editor's Note: Below is the 7 part series in full for you to share, FB, Tweet. Thank you.)

By Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill

1. The Wrong Narrative.

Polio is the iconic epidemic, its conquest one of medicine’s heroic dramas. The narrative is by now familiar: Random, inexplicable outbreaks paralyzed and killed thousands of infants and children and struck raw terror into 20^th century parents, triggering a worldwide race to identify the virus and develop a vaccine. Success ushered in the triumphant era of mass vaccination. Now polio’s last hideouts amid the poorest of the poor in Asia and Africa are under relentless siege by, among others, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Eradication is just a matter of time, and many more illnesses will soon meet the same fate.

But based on our research over the past two years, we believe this narrative is wrong – and wrong for reasons that go beyond mere historical interest. The misunderstanding of polio has warped the public health response to modern illnesses in ways that actually make them harder to prevent, control, and treat.

The reality, we believe, is that the virus itself was just half the epidemic equation -- necessary but not sufficient to create The Age of Polio. Outbreaks were not caused solely by poliovirus – the microbe was an ancient and heretofore harmless intestinal bug -- but by its interaction with a new toxin, most often innovative pesticides used to treat fruits and vegetables.

This alternative narrative makes better sense of the natural history of polio, and it resolves a number of anomalies that remain to this day. It suggests why poliomyelitis outbreaks emerged, evolved, and exploded the way they did; it probably solves, for the first time, the enduring riddle of why Franklin D. Roosevelt was afflicted 90 years ago this summer on Campobello Island; and it may mean today’s billion-dollar-a-year eradication effort is misguided, if not downright quixotic.

These are large claims. Let us explain.

--

Polio was a strange illness, never fully understood even by those who devoted their lives to studying and subduing it. It was a summer plague, coming on in late spring and all but vanishing in the fall. Many thought contagion had something to do with water, and Americans kept their children away from swimming pools in droves.

There is a profound distinction between poliovirus – an enterovirus, one that enters through the mouth and takes up residence in the GI tract and bloodstream – and poliomyelitis, the paralytic form of the illness. In the vast majority of cases, the virus causes either a minor illness or an inapparent infection.

But in 1 or 2 in 100 cases, the virus somehow gets past multiple defenses and into the nervous system, where it finds its way to the anterior horn cells at the top front of the spinal column. There, it preferentially attacks the gray-colored motor neurons (polio means gray in Greek) and causes inflammation of the protective myelin sheath (myelitis). This interferes with nerve signals to the muscles and can lead to temporary or permanent paralysis of the limbs and the respiratory system. A small number of people who contract poliomyelitis -- on the order of 1 percent -- die.

The first recorded U.S. outbreak was in 1841 in West Feliciana, Louisiana (10 cases, no deaths). There was a half-century gap until the next cluster, in 1893 in Boston (26 cases, no deaths). Then, in 1894, came what is widely regarded as the first major epidemic, in Rutland and Proctor, Vermont (132 cases, 18 deaths). Thirty more outbreaks – from such seemingly disparate locations as Oceana County, Michigan, and California’s Napa Valley -- were reported in the United States through 1909. The worst by far was New York in 1907, with 2,500 cases and a five percent mortality rate, a harbinger of the 1916 epidemic in the Northeast that killed 2,000 in New York City alone.[i]

What is most remarkable about this list is that so few outbreaks of paralytic polio were recorded anywhere in the world before the latter 19^th century. Poliomyelitis is considered an ancient scourge, but the evidence supporting that belief is quite threadbare. An oft-cited Egyptian drawing depicts a priest with a withered leg that could have stemmed from paralytic polio, but for most of recorded history there were few observations of the sudden-onset fever and paralysis in infants that characterizes the disease. The earliest well-documented case of infantile paralysis in an individual is widely considered to be Sir Walter Scott, afflicted as an infant in 1773.[ii]

There is little question that the poliovirus was endemic in humans for millennia; there may even have been isolated cases of poliomyelitis for much of that period. Yet the poliovirus did not trigger widespread outbreaks of poliomyelitis. Setting aside for now the 1841 Louisiana outbreak, reported retrospectively, something seems to have happened around 1890 to launch The Age of Polio in the United States. And something else must have changed around the end of World War II to create the large modern epidemics seared into the minds of older Americans, thousands of whom are poliomyelitis survivors and almost all of whom know someone who was afflicted.

While we have not written about polio, we have seen this pattern before. In our book, The Age of Autism – Mercury, Medicine, and a Man-made Epidemic, we argued that something happened in the 1930s to launch The Age of Autism.[iii] We proposed it was the commercialization of ethyl mercury compounds for use in pesticides – seed disinfectants and lumber preservatives – and in vaccinations; we offered evidence of those inventions in the family backgrounds of the first autism cases identified in the medical literature, in 1943. Similarly, we proposed that the sharp rise in autism cases beginning around 1990 tracks with the federal government recommending several more mercury-containing shots.

Our attention was drawn to polio during our autism research when a virologist mentioned, in passing, that poliomyelitis could be triggered in some instances by injections. Called “provocation poliomyelitis,”[iv] this can happen when a needle stick punctures a nerve in the peripheral nervous system. An active poliovirus infection – typically, in a child exposed to the virus for the first time and not yet immune -- can gain access to the nervous system through a process called “retrograde axonal transport,” traveling back to the spinal column and triggering the dreaded paralytic form, poliomyelitis.

Such cases of provocation paralysis, we learned, occurred in Eastern Europe when antibiotics were excessively administered by injection; this practice led to multiple cases of poliomyelitis.[v] Bulbar polio – of the throat and respiratory system – was recognized as more common after tonsillectomies, again because nerve endings had been exposed.[vi] Outbreaks, then, can unquestionably occur as a result of an environmental injury, in these instances either excessive injection or surgery that led to peripheral nerve damage, in the presence of poliovirus infection.

We began to look at the poliomyelitis literature and found that another and much more comprehensive environmental theory of the disease had been put forward almost immediately after the early outbreaks, although it never gained mainstream attention. This theory proposed that what is called “polio” is not caused by a virus at all, but by poisoning from pesticides. In this theory, lead arsenate triggered the early clusters, and DDT kicked off the large outbreaks after World War II. (The pesticide theory has been championed in recent years by Jim West[vii] and by Janine Roberts[viii].)

That really got our attention. In our research for The Age of Autism, we investigated a paralytic illness we believe resulted from an unrecognized interaction between a toxin and a microbe. Called general paralysis of the insane, or GPI, it was a gruesome and universally fatal outcome in a percentage of people infected years earlier with the syphilis bacteria. We proposed that a manmade mercury compound -- ironically used to “treat” syphilis -- allowed syphilis to gain entrance to the brain. When penicillin was developed in the 1940s and actually killed syphilis infections, GPI disappeared because one of the two requirements for the illness – the microbe – was destroyed.

We suggested that a number of other illnesses may follow a similar pattern in which microbes and metals interact, including, in some instances, autism. So the idea that an environmental insult – whether a needle stick or surgery or a toxic metals exposure – could be at work in outbreaks of poliomyelitis intrigued us.

But we did not find the claim that polio was simply poisoning by pesticides alone to be persuasive. The strong versions of both the virus theory and the pesticide theory – that it was entirely one or the other – are too simple to explain the pattern of evidence. The strong viral theory can’t explain the sudden emergence of poliomyelitis; the strong pesticide theory can’t explain the sudden protective effect of poliovirus vaccinations. Rather, we propose that poliomyelitis outbreaks are man-made events that result from the synergy of microbe and toxin.