Koch had a PhD in chemistry. He was also a medical doctor.

He wrote about extreme prejudice to his ideas. He was a threat to the cancer industry even back then. He was a forerunner to every other cancer "quack" that there was.

Conventional chemo/radiation has a terrible success rate, but better non-toxic alternatives are consistently suppressed. His ideas were good enough to be endorsed by Nobel Laureate Otto Warburg, the only other person to win 2 Nobel Prizes besides Linus Pauling, as well as Nobel Laureate Albert Szent-Gyorgyi. This is 3 Nobel Prizes behind Koch's theory.

I would trust what he is saying about polio rates. It would be nice to find the primary source though.

Hi Narad

Koch is obviously a controversial figure - I don't comment either way but do we have any other source for those figures? It may be like what has happened in India as reported by Vashisht and Puliyel:

"It was hoped that following polio eradication, immunisation could be stopped. However the synthesis of polio virus in 2002, made eradication impossible. It is argued that getting poor countries to expend their scarce resources on an impossible dream over the last 10 years was unethical. Furthermore, while India has been polio-free for a year, there has been a huge increase in non-polio acute flaccid paralysis (NPAFP). In 2011, there were an extra 47,500 new cases of NPAFP. Clinically indistinguishable from polio paralysis but twice as deadly, the incidence of NPAFP was directly proportional to doses of oral polio received. Though this data was collected within the polio surveillance system, it was not investigated. The principle of primum-non-nocere was violated. The authors suggest that the huge bill of US$ 8 billion spent on the programme, is a small sum to pay if the world learns to be wary of such vertical programmes in the future."

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22591873

Re: Ontario 1936/1937 polio demographics

I believe this is also the same time that sulphanomides (just before penicillin) came on the market up there?
Also, sugar itself is a known wound healer: is that because of it's antibacterial properties?

Maybe probiotic activity helps to control viral influence in the body, just like it balances yeast. If suphanomides and then antibiotics (in addition to sugar) were all beginning to be heavily used during that time period, in addition to vaccines with contain known poisons that are also registered antibiotics, some of which I bet if we properly tested them they lead to opening up tight junctures in many areas of the body, well, it would make sense that those in higher or slightly higher socio economic circumstances in certain geographical areas might see polio before others, as their probiotic balance would have been destroyed first.

Skilled laborers would have been more likely to injure themselves, and having more money would have been more likely to seek medical help from doctors using the newly available suphanomides, vs clerical workers who would be less likely to injure themselves in work-related ways but whom would also seek medical help in those circumstances. Skilled laborers (welders? industrial workers? plumbers/ construction workers & millers cutting treated wood?) would have also been exposed to more metal work/toxins..

The hypothesis might be that too many antibiotics in multiple forms from multiple sources or a lack of probiotics or the destruction of probiotics leads to an increase in death and disability (paralysis-loss of motor control) in the human population because it allows existing toxic antibiotic resistance bacteria and viruses to exert influence over the body in ways they can't in the presence of a healthy probiotic micro biome.

Eindeker;
That is a good study that you brought to light.
Did this take place in 1936?
It does really point out that more of those with skilled labor had more polio.
So how to interpret and figure out the reason.

The first knee jerk would be they could afford clean running water, indoor toilets with a real septic system - and even pine sol, Lysol, and even electricity to help them clean with pine sol.

My Dad just had his 92 birthday yesterday. My Mother is also still alive and very quick of mind; she reads all the time -and has better eyes that I do. Dad is quick in his mind too - but he has Parkinson and he is deaf almost too.

So, I know all the tales of how it was growing up in the 30s.

This was a time when there was a world wide depression going on, and it hit pretty hard in the Appalachian mountains where my parents were raised. Well really they were raised in the Cumberland Mountains.

There seemed to be a big difference in the poor and the middle class, esp when I listen to my in-laws; one was raised on the East Coast - Peekskill, NY and the other in southern California. Big - big difference.

Maybe the Middle class had running water and bathrooms? In the Cumberland Mountains no one had in door bathrooms or running water in 1936 ..

My parents nor any of their brothers or sisters had polio - but there was a younger cousin that did. Polio did hit here, but I am unsure of the years - that this did happen.

But I know that my parents were so poor that the only time they had a bit of candy was at Christmas time. Dad always talked about the Christmas blues. I never understood what he was talking about. Mother finally told me that they had nothing and the excitement of the season that they might get a little something was almost just too much of a let down when they received nothing or very little. Thus the Christmas blues. .

Dad said that one Christmas evening he had eaten all of his hard candy - which was not much and he was saving on his caps he got for his cap pistol - they were almost gone; when his uncle came riding along on a white mule and pulled out another bag of candy - for all his siblings. His Christmas blues were lifted.

Polio comes around just like a common cold - that is my understanding and if you go to public school and there was public schools up in the mountains - and in Canada too - I would suppose - and school kids take it home to the infants - I just don't see the clean theory working.

Another theory could just as easily fit and that would be what can the middle class afford that the poor cannot?

I find myself saying some times "cheap as molasses" I am surprised - and wonder where I picked that up. As a child I suppose, I have heard it. Molasses was really cheap and sugar was too even for my parents as children. Yet, at that time the local custom of making their own sorghum was slowly being replaced by store bought molasses, though sorghum molasses is still preferred if you can get it in this part of the country.

There might very well be more to it than a middle class with electricity and running water and toilets. and cleaner. It might be more of what the middle class could afford; a few extra store bought luxuries perhaps.

You would reasonably have to concede that. .

If polio hit the affluent hard in the 1950's, then I must point out that they were the most likely to skip breastfeeding and the most likely to have vaccinated their children for small pox and DPT.

Funny, in 2016, the affluent are the ones most likely to skip vaccinating. It has come full circle. No coincidence. 70 years of pertussis vaccine and the outbreaks are in the vaccinated? Whew. If polio was "wiped out" how come we can't do it again with every disease?

Speculation serves each of our agendas. Today, we must choose a common sense approach to the current vaccine schedule. There is enough evidence that makes me think vaccines are the first culprit in so called, "co-factors."

Eindeker

Benedetta:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11620075 "The middle-class plague: epidemic polio and the Canadian state, 1936-37 " ....held most strongly by the middle class-- polio's principal target--shaped a unique Canadian response"
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/269659871_A_middle-class_plague_Distribution_of_polio_deaths_by_socioeconomic_class_in_southern_Ontario_Canada_1900-1937
Canadian socioeconomic analysis & polio deaths in Ontario
From the 336 total polio deaths, sufficient information was available for assignment of a status score (SS) for 203 individuals. Of these, 39.4% fell under SS 3 (skilled labourers), 33.0% at SS 2 (entrepreneurial and clerical workers), 14.3% at SS 4 (semi-skilled labourers), 8.4% at SS 5 (unskilled labourers), and 4.9% at SS 1 (professionals). In urban areas, SS 3 was overrepresented in polio deaths compared to its proportion of the urban child population, while SS 2 was underrepresented. These findings suggest that at least in terms of mortality, the families of skilled and semi-skilled labourers in southern Ontario were disproportionately at risk from polio, experiencing a deadly combination of lower risk of exposure to the virus at early age and a higher risk of intensive exposure later.

& finally data from Copenhagen http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/content/31/1/181.full
If, indeed, intensive exposure is a critical factor, part of the reason for the changing epidemiology of polio in this century may have been a gradual improvement of hygienic conditions, transforming a disease from endemic to epidemic with longer intervals between outbreaks. With longer intervals between epidemics, increasing accumulation of simultaneously susceptible individuals will occur in a family, thereby increasing the risk of intensive exposure and intra-family spread

Eindeker:

In one of your three points: "Disease prevalence was higher in more affluent suburbs, presumably reflecting the better sanitation and lack of exposure to polio virus in infants."

Was it really????? How was that determined? I would be interested in how they decided poor communities/ middle class communities/ rich communities. So are you saying that when it hit the middle class (which was kind of hard to determine from the poor communities at that time) so let us just go with rich communities - so when it hit the rich communities - there was no problem and no polio happening in the poor communities at all?

Cause from what I noticed it came like a thief in the night - hitting one house but missing another - rich or poor.

Dan your comment I believe it ended epidemics by knocking out the virus, though not the co-factor that amplified it in the first place recognises that the introduction of the polio vaccine has eliminated polio in many countries, and hopefully in the next few years will send it the same way as smallpox.

But you build a whole hypothesis on some speculative co-factor whereas the commonly accepted explanation for the polio outbreaks in cities in the early 20th C is bizarrely improved hygiene and sanitation. This is based on 3 firm facts:
> Paralytic polio is a far more serious disease in adults than in infants The death-to-case ratio for paralytic polio is generally 2%–5% among children and up to 15%–30% for adults depending
on age). It increases to 25%–75% with bulbar involvement.
> Disease prevalence was higher in more affluent suburbs, presumably reflecting the better sanitation and lack of exposure to polio virus in infants
> During this period the age distribution increased quite dramatically, evolving from “infantile paralysis” into a disease mainly of children and young adults
There is a really excellent slide set from an Austrian University http://www.meduniwien.ac.at/100yearspolio/pfds/nathanson.pdf which goes through serology, case age distribution and many other factors in the pre-vaccine era. Dan (& others) I would strongly recommend you go through this, particularly striking is slide 4 which looks at the distribution of paralytic polio cases in Europeans & Moroccans living in Casablanca immediately prior to the vaccine era.
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/pubs/pinkbook/downloads/polio.pdf

There is no need to invoke some speculative co-factor (arsenic et al) in changes in polio epidemiology during the 20th Century, unless you classify increasing hygiene and reduced exposure at a young age, as a co-factor. I'd be really interested to see your comments on the Austrian slide set Dan

Dan,
Thanks for asking me questions. I believe the standard thought on the existence of viruses. I also believe that it is the general health of an individual that allows viruses to grow or not, become lethal or not.

I believe the polio epidemic was probably the result of a confluence of factors, not the least of which could have been pesticides. Ironically it was yours and Mark B's influence on me that may be the actual cause of any differences we may or may not have!

The word, "co-factor" seems to have made its way into the vaccine controversy rather recently. To the degree that scientists are honest, they speculate that the autism epidemic may have environmental factors. To you, Mark and most of us, well, duh. And you have taken it a bit further by applying that same logic to polio for instance.

How hard is it to believe that an environmental toxin that can result in an assault on the nervous system, might also exacerbate a virus' ability to cause neurological problems? So that's where I agree with you. But it comes down to the overall health of the individual doesn't it? A person with less exposure to pesticides could be healthier and less susceptible to disease, than a person who is exposed to pesticides.

Where we might differ is in asking what is, and what would have been, a better way to deal with an epidemic than a vaccine. So you might say that my hypothesis is that health doesn't come from a needle and proving that comes from finding populations with no vaccines and showing they are, or were healthier. And again, that's why I appreciate your early work on the Amish population.

Polio is so difficult because we cannot separate sound science from folk lore. The culture believes that there was a disease that could cause paralysis and death and then there was a vaccine and then there was no polio. It's too simple on its face, yet that is the start and finish of it. It seems a lot more believable to say, if mothers kept breastfeeding, if we had no arsenic, if we were not also vaccinating with the crude DTP vaccine and small pox at the time of the epidemics, if we had not manipulated stats to show a decline in the epidemic conveniently after the mass vaccination campaigns, if we hadn't re-named paralysis, if our breathing machines were tiny instead of huge and scary, if we used physical therapy instead of leg braces, then maybe folk lore would have been much different than it is today.

In other words if what causes an epidemic and its subsequent societal hysteria are things that were man-caused mistakes, then the answer must lie in not doing those things, not adding another man-caused disaster of imperfect vaccines. Especially when we can see very plainly in our current population that unvaccinated kids are healthier.

"Your arguments are strengthened if and when you might find a geographical area where DDT was not used in the 50's and 60's and then found a corresponding lack of polio outbreaks."

If we wish to strengthen Dan's arguments, I suggest we find a way to exhume the bodies of some polio fatalities and check for toxins such as arsenic and DDT. Arsenic is a base element so it does not degrade over time. DDT is said to be persistent in the environment, so we may be able find it too.

If we can prove that these polio victims had been poisoned, denial will be difficult.

Dan,
So I found one quick reference to the decline of DDT on the EPA website.

"The peak year for use in the United States was 1959 when nearly 80 million pounds were applied. From that high point, usage declined steadily to about 13 million pounds in 1971, most of it applied to cotton." https://www.epa.gov/aboutepa/ddt-ban-takes-effect

So if a reduction in DDT started in 1959, maybe that helped the decline of polio more than the vaccine could have. And the popularity of the book, "Silent Spring" could have had an impact also. So hard to be definitive, but we try.

Your arguments are strengthened if and when you might find a geographical area where DDT was not used in the 50's and 60's and then found a corresponding lack of polio outbreaks.

Oh, so titers against viruses not arsenic.

Thanks Teresa--

The polio viruses are like colds - they circulated - not always present - but common enough - that is my understanding of them too.

.

Teresa Conrick

Titers - increased more if arsenic was included with the flu protein, or just all by itself?

High titers does not sound like something that might be a good thing, but a dangerous health condition - perhaps?

david m bird: That double dose of flu vaccine in 2009 is likely the cause of the big spike in autism rates among California kindergarteners last school year. I believe that was also the cause of Dr. Humphries beginning her journey into vaccine research.

Just wondering: What other food crops were also treated with arsenic weed killers or pesticide? If there were other much consumed food stuffs containing arsenic, wouldn't they also cause polio? I am thinking grains such as corn, wheat, barley etc. or potatoes.

Nonnymouse,
You're right, I confused the names. However, both the black plague and hantavirus continue to kill a small number of people in the US, both transmitted by rodents, like the Black Plague in the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries.

http://www.travelerstoday.com/articles/2954/20120906/bubonic-plague-hantavirus-west-nile-virus-symptoms-prevention-how-its-spread-where-it-occurs-bubonic-plague-colorado-hantavirus-yosemite-national-park-west-nile-texas.htm

"Bubonic Plague
Recently, a seven-year-old girl caught a case of the bubonic plague, a disease that killed millions of Europeans in the Middle ages. The girl got the disease after coming in contact with a dead squirrel at a Colorado camping ground. The girl is recovering and will survive after treatment.
How it's spread: Bubonic plague is spread when a person comes in contact with infected fleas that are found on rodents like rats, mice and squirrels.
Symptoms: Sudden high fever, chills, headache, weakness, swollen lymph nodes, seizures and hemorrhages under the skin.
Where it occurs: Bubonic Plague is very rare as only about 10 cases occur each year in the U.S. Most cases occur in the Southwest. The latest case in in Colorado.
How to avoid It: Avoid contact with rodents; eliminate rock and wood piles where rodents can breed near the home, check pets for fleas and have them treated.
Hantavirus
This summer, some people who camped at Yosemite National Park, died from Hantavirus and thousands of others may have been exposed to the illness.
How it's spread: Hantavirus is contracted when a person touches or breathes in air particles that contain urine, saliva or feces from certain mice or rats, especially deer mice.
Symptoms: Symptoms can form within one to six weeks after exposure. They include flu-like symptoms such as chills, fever and muscle aches. This then progresses to dry coughs, headache, nausea and vomiting, followed by shortness of breath as the lungs fill with fluid.
Where it occurs: It can occur anywhere in the U.S. where infected rodents dwell. The most recent case was at Yosemite National Park in California.
How to avoid it: Eliminate rodent nesting areas. Open windows of buildings that have been closed for a while and allow the area to air out for half an hour. If you see mouse droppings, spray them with a mix of water and bleach, wait 15 minutes and mop up or wipe with paper towels."

ciaparker,

Hantavirus is not "black plague." It is a virus, a bunyavirus.

Plague is a bacterial disease. It is caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis.

Two completely different health problems.

I believe that there were factors which changed the formerly mild, universal polio virus into a much more dangerous one which would cripple many thousands. The DPT vaccine, DDT and other chemicals in the environment, arsenic all probably did so, and Dr. Sandler showed that those who avoided sugar consumption also avoided large numbers being affected in polio epidemics. But there is no way to avoid exposure to all such factors in the modern world, and it would be impossible for most people to completely avoid sugar, meaning that it is conceivable that polio could come back in a big way if a lot of people stopped vaccinating for it. I agree that polio is ultimately harmless in the vast majority of those exposed to it, but how could you ever know if you or your child has had NONE of the problematic exposures which might make them vulnerable to sudden and unexpected crippling by polio as so many thousands experienced in the '40s and '50s in the US?

I am certain that the polio vaccines eradicated polio from the US and most other countries as well. I think it would be wise to consider both sides before getting this or any other vaccine, and I would not recommend getting the polio vaccine unless polio made a comeback here, but if it did, everyone would have to weight the risks and the benefits of the vaccine, bearing in mind the large number of those permanently disabled by polio and many killed by it as well in the early to mid-twentieth century in the US. We have no idea of the complete list of chemicals which can enable polio. Not a single one of us has had no exposure to any of the possible culprits, and it would not be possible for any of us to avoid them completely unless we lived in an impossible bubble. Just another uncertainty which has to be placed on the risk/benefit scale and evaluated to the best of our ability. But we should respect the decision to get the polio vaccine as a reasonable one on the part of anyone who chooses it.

Hi Eileen, I did look at that list you sent me and yes, it is interesting. i will get the ones not available online when i go to the national library of medicine -- it's just up the beltway from me. this series will end up in the autism world, trust me. otherwise i would not be publishing it here.

No David, I did not forget how WIKI has put a stain on good people's reputation. . WIKI is a sorry excuse for an encyclopedia, and I hated using them. They are the perfect example of how information can be so abundant and yet twisted by anyone with a bit of power. I was sorry to used it. Even college research classes/courses say do not use WIKI in your references. So we all know they have a poor reputation.

And yet I did use it when I was looking up who did invent blood typing - I knew it was before WWI but was unsure and was surprised that in the very first short paragraph the inventor of blood typing was linked to the way they identified the polio virus.

When they say identify, that is what they mean - they have a quick, reliable way of identifying a microbe. --- but that was not what I was wanting to discuss.

.

Benedetta, I must say you gave me the biggest laugh when you complimented Wiki/Wikipedia as "always good for a quick reference." ???!!

Perhaps you forgot to include the caveat: "except anything whatsoever to do with autism, age of autism, Dan Olmsted, or anything to do with vaccines or disease." Thanks for the humor!

Here, I found that the man that discovered a way to distinguish blood types had everything to do with identifying the polio virus too.

This is just WIKI -but always good for a quick reference.

."Karl Landsteiner, ForMemRS[1] (June 14, 1868 – June 26, 1943), was an Austrian biologist and physician.[2] He is noted for having distinguished the main blood groups in 1900, having developed the modern system of classification of blood groups from his identification of the presence of agglutinins in the blood, and having identified, with Alexander S. Wiener, the Rhesus factor, in 1937, thus enabling physicians to transfuse blood without endangering the patient's life. [it is worth mentioning about the contribution of Prof.Jan Jansky in this field]. With Constantin Levaditi and Erwin Popper, he discovered the polio virus in 1909. He received the Aronson Prize in 1926. In 1930, he received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. He was awarded the Lasker Award in 1946 posthumously, and is recognized as the father of transfusion medicine :

Dan,
I understand that DDT came in closer to our 1950's epidemic of polio, so since polio epidemics seemed to decrease, corresponding to the banning of this pesticide, it begs the question as to whether or not the answer to saving lives had more to do with reducing the "pesticide co-factor" in the spread of polio than did the vaccine.

Additionally I was asking if there were populations in our country or others where no pesticides were used, while also confirming wild polio exposure? And then, did those areas see more or less or the same epidemic? Depending on what is found, I think that would strengthen what you are saying about the pesticides playing a role in making polio epidemics worse.

I am sorry, if you addressed this in other writings that I may have missed. Since diseases that never had a vaccine for them also showed steep declines, it is difficult to separate each of the confounding factors in the retrospective look at polio, the epidemic, and the vaccine.

If the polio virus existed in nature, and then epidemics manifested only after pesticides "amplified its ability to cause paralysis," then how could we retrospectively prove that the removal of these neurotoxins could have been the most effective weapon against the virus, which until then, co-existed without disaster? And, as you know my bias, more effective than the vaccine, given the near disappearance of other diseases or fatalities without a vaccine.

Eindeker, Thanks.

My continuing questions are: Were the "paralytic" cases you cite transient or permanent, and how serious were the paralyses? And, what were the nutritional statuses, etc., of those afflicted? And, were they children or adults?

And then we (I, anyway) must ask what were other cofounders, such as other recent vaccinations that could cause similar symptoms (i.e. Guillane Barre)?

The Medical World has forever thrown similar symptoms in the same bowl, then announcing a Crisis, then declaring they will save us with a new vaccine. It never stops, aka Zika today (what a ludicrous Practical Joke!)

hi cynthia, if i understand your question, and please restate it if don't, my answer is the "bad apples" did not decrease. ddt and other pesticides came along after world war 2 and while arsenic type pesticides decreased, apples (etc) were still getting sprayed with bad stuff right up to the point the polio vaccine entered the picture. i'm unclear on the no-co-factors question. and about other countries who had exposure -- to what? an example of each would help. thanks for your interest, i respect your views and appreciate your raising these issues.

Dan,
I have a question. Did polio cases decrease as "bad apples" disappeared? If you could find cases where there were no co-factors, would we find less epidemics? What about other countries who had exposure but ate differently?

on the poliovirus -- it is not the star of this series because it is not the cause of poliomyelitis outbreaks -- a toxic co-factor that "amplifies" it is the cause. that's my theory anyway. still, the fact that a vaccine stopped the epidemics seems like pretty strong evidence that the poliovirus was involved. what am i missing?

Dan, Glad to see you are using the National Library of Medicine, and forget about Orac, who is part of the misguided medical establishment.

Yesterday, I was responding to a critic of Anne Dachel's observation of increasing numbers of autistic adults; I looked up a 19th century report of then very rare echolalic speech, and found another interesting paper. This was an authoritative report written in 1905 on how beriberi was an infection caused by contaminated rice.

Beriberi was later found to be caused by vitamin B1 (thiamine) deficiency in people who had begun eating refined white rice. The brainstem damage in beriberi is the same as in Wernicke's encephalopathy caused by alcohol abuse or toxic substances like mercury, lead, valproic acid, or asphyxia at birth.

See: Wright H. The Cause, Course, Prevention, and Treatment of Beriberi. Public Health Papers and Reports. 1905; 31(Pt 1): 289–299.
Online at http://conradsimon.org/WrightBeriberi1905.html

The polio virus was first identified in 1908, but the ability to diagnosis the illness by seeing the actual virus did not happen until the late 1950s. I found the following at: http://www.historyofvaccines.org/content/timelines/polio

1908
Polio Virus Identified

In Vienna, Karl Landsteiner, MD (1868-1943), and Erwin Popper, MD (1879-1955), announced that the infectious agent in polio was a virus.

Popper and Landsteiner deduced the viral nature of polio by carefully filtering preparations of spinal cord fluid from a person who had died of polio. The filters were known to trap bacteria. When Popper and Landsteiner injected the filtered preparations into monkeys, the monkeys developed polio. The researchers then concluded that an infectious particle smaller than bacteria caused the disease.

Polio virus itself would not be visible to researchers until the 1950s, when the electron microscope was available.

This particular abstract is specific to pregnancy. But the basic concept doesn't necessarily have to apply to pregnancy, one would not think.

- - - - - - -

Environ Res. 2015 Oct;142:273-80. doi: 10.1016/j.envres.2015.07.004. Epub 2015 Jul 15.
Arsenic exposure and hepatitis E virus infection during pregnancy.
Heaney CD, et al.

Abstract

BACKGROUND:
Arsenic has immunomodulatory properties and may have the potential to alter susceptibility to infection in humans.

OBJECTIVES:
We aimed to assess the relation of arsenic exposure during pregnancy with immune function and hepatitis E virus (HEV) infection, defined as seroconversion during pregnancy and postpartum.\

METHODS:
We assessed IgG seroconversion to HEV between 1st and 3rd trimester (TM) and 3 months postpartum (PP) among 1100 pregnancies in a multiple micronutrient supplementation trial in rural Bangladesh. Forty women seroconverted to HEV and were matched with 40 non-seroconverting women (controls) by age, parity and intervention. We assessed urinary inorganic arsenic plus methylated species (∑As) (µg/L) at 1st and 3rd TM and plasma cytokines (pg/mL) at 1st and 3rd TM and 3 months PP.

RESULTS:
HEV seroconverters' urinary ∑As was elevated throughout pregnancy. Non-seroconverters' urinary ∑As was similar to HEV seroconverters at 1st TM but declined at 3rd TM. The adjusted odds ratio (95% confidence interval) of HEV seroconversion was 2.17 (1.07, 4.39) per interquartile range (IQR) increase in average-pregnancy urinary ∑As. Increased urinary ∑As was associated with increased concentrations of IL-2 during the 1st and 3rd TM and 3 months PP among HEV seroconverters but not non-seroconverters.

CONCLUSIONS:
The relation of urinary arsenic during pregnancy with incident HEV seroconversion and with IL-2 levels among HEV-seroconverting pregnant women suggests arsenic exposure during pregnancy may enhance susceptibility to HEV infection.

TRIAL REGISTRATION: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT00860470.

Dan,
Sorry for knocking on your door the 10th time (and not getting in :-), but why on earth do you (half) blame this mysterious virus (it was surely mysterious in 1926 or 1916) with causing an epidemic? What scientific evidence until 1926 do you have, these epidemics had anything to do with the polio virus?

How about trying to disprove it? Polio epidemics in populations which didn't eat sugar and didn't have other exposure to arsenic compounds? If you could find such.

If you can't find counter examples, it makes the argument that much stronger.

How much longer until you finally say it wasn't the vaccines?