CANCER ALARM FOR POLIO CONTAMINATED VACCINE
CANCER ALARM FOR POLIO CONTAMINATED VACCINE
082037 LUG 04
(AGI) – Rome, July 8 – An anti-polio vaccine produced in the former Soviet Union was allegedly contaminated with a virus of monkeys that provokes cancer starting from early 80s. The alarm comes from a research of the Italian doctor Michele Carbone of the Loyola University Medical Center of Chicago (US) who had already find this kind of contamination in the samples of vaccine produced in the sixties.
During the Vaccine Cell Substrate meeting in the US, Carbone underlined that hundreds of million people in the world could have been exposed to this virus after 1963, because the vaccine was exported from Soviet Union to Australia, Japan and many African countries. The virus is called SV40 and is typical of the Macao monkey. It is probably linked to some kinds of cancer like the mesoteliome of lugs. The contamination was due to the technique used for the preparation of the vaccine, based on the use of kidneys of monkeys and on a sterilisation procedure based on magnesium chloride, but this sterilisation was efficient at 95 pct. Russians abandoned their vaccine only after 1981 and adopted a product by the World Health organisation that was virus SV40 free. Carbone has discovered this contamination studying the samples of vaccine found in the refrigerators of the British National Institute for Biological Standards and Control but he did not give further explanation at the moment in fact the research will be published by a scientific magazine. The problem is serious. Many countries continue to use vaccines that could be contaminated, and in the US the food and drug administration, the watchdog of food and drugs, was sued by people who think that they have contracted cancer due to a contaminated anti-polio vaccine.