Was Polio Conquered?

To find the answer to this question, it must first be understood that the disease known as Polio is nothing more than a collection of symptoms which have been given a name. These are the exact same symptoms of disease commonly seen with the flu as well as other ailments. The only “major difference” is that they added the small chance of paralysis to the list. Let’s take a look at the symptoms as described by the CDC:

Polio Symptoms

“Most people who get infected with poliovirus (about 72 out of 100) will not have any visible symptoms.

About 1 out of 4 people (or 25 out of 100) with poliovirus infection will have flu-like symptoms that may include:

• Sore throat
• Fever
• Tiredness
• Nausea
• Headache
• Stomach pain

These symptoms usually last 2 to 5 days, then go away on their own.

A smaller proportion of people (much less than one out of 100, or 1-5 out of 1000) with poliovirus infection will develop other, more serious symptoms that affect the brain and spinal cord:

• Paresthesia (feeling of pins and needles in the legs)
• Meningitis (infection of the covering of the spinal cord and/or brain) occurs in about 1 out of 25 people with poliovirus infection
• Paralysis (can’t move parts of the body) or weakness in the arms, legs, or both, occurs in about 1 out of 200 people with poliovirus infection”

“Note that “poliomyelitis” (or “polio” for short) is defined as the paralytic disease. So only people with the paralytic infection are considered to have the disease.”

https://www.cdc.gov/polio/what-is-polio/index.htm

If we are to believe the CDC, only those who develop paralysis are considered to have Polio. Otherwise, it must be assumed to be the flu, “Covid-19,” the common cold, or any of the other diseases that have the exact same symptoms minus paralysis. Taking this further, the CDC states that the vast majority of Polio cases are asymptomatic (i.e. healthy), meaning 72 out of 100 people with Polio are potentially running around infecting others unknowingly. However, along with nonexistent symptoms of disease, they also don’t have paralysis so are they really cases of Polio? Make up your mind CDC.

Vaccine-Induced Polio

Contrary to popular belief, what is known as Polio was never eradicated and still exists today. In India, Aftica, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, it is still said to be causing problems, although the majority of the cases are now claimed to be “vaccine-induced” Polio:

Polio Vaccination Causes More Infections than Wild Virus

“Nigeria, Democratic Republic of Congo, Central African Republic, and Angola have experienced nine new cases of polio caused by the live virus in oral polio vaccines that has mutated into an infectious form, according to statistics released last week (November 20) by the World Health Organization. That brings the global total of these types of infections to 157 for the year, and it means that more children are paralyzed as a result of such vaccine-derived infections than illnesses caused by the wildtype virus, which has affected 107 people this year.

Other countries in Africa and Asia have also reported such vaccine-derived infections, which have the potential to spark new outbreaks. In Africa alone, there are currently a dozen vaccine-derived polio outbreaks, and another was declared in the Philippines last month—the country’s first cases of the disease in more than 25 years, NPR reports.”

“It’s actually crazy because we’re vaccinating now against the vaccine in most parts of the world,” Vincent Racaniello, a virologist at Columbia University, tells NPR, “not against wild polio, which is confined to Pakistan and Afghanistan.”

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/polio-vaccination-causes-more-infections-than-wild-virus-66778/amp

Acute Flaccid Myelitis, a.k.a Polio

In the US, Polio was said to be completely eradicated by the vaccines. However, if we were to look at a “new” (but not so new) condition with the exact same symptoms, we can clearly see that this is not the case:

Acute Flaccid Myelitis: What Parents Should Know About a New, Polio-Like Illness

“A rare but frightening polio-like illness is striking more and more kids in the United States. It has also affected children in Australia and Asia.

“It’s important for parents to seek prompt care for any child with acute flaccid myelitis (AFM),” says pediatric orthopaedic surgeon Joseph Styron, MD, PhD.

“While it usually affects the limbs, in rare cases, AFM can affect the muscles in the respiratory system, making it difficult for children to breathe. This can be life-threatening.”

https://www.google.com/amp/s/health.clevelandclinic.org/acute-flaccid-myelitis-what-parents-should-know-about-a-new-polio-like-illness/amp/

Acute flaccid myelitis (AFM)

“Acute flaccid myelitis (AFM) is a rare but serious condition that affects the spinal cord. It can cause sudden weakness in the arms or legs, loss of muscle tone, and loss of reflexes. The condition mainly affects young children.

Most children have a mild respiratory illness or fever caused by a viral infection about one to four weeks before developing symptoms of acute flaccid myelitis.”

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/acute-flaccid-myelitis/symptoms-causes/syc-20493046

Acute Flaccid Myelitis: Something Old and Something New

“Since 2014, acute flaccid myelitis (AFM), a long-recognized condition associated with polioviruses, nonpolio enteroviruses, and various other viral and nonviral causes, has been reemerging globally in epidemic form. This unanticipated reemergence is ironic, given that polioviruses, once the major causes of AFM, are now at the very threshold of global eradication and cannot therefore explain any aspect of AFM reemergence. Instead, the new AFM epidemic has been temporally associated with reemergences of nonpolio enteroviruses such as EV-D68, until recently thought to be an obscure virus of extremely low endemicity. This perspective reviews the enigmatic epidemiologic, virologic, and diagnostic aspects of epidemic AFM reemergence; examines current options for clinical management; discusses future research needs; and suggests that the AFM epidemic offers important clues to mechanisms of viral disease emergence.”

“AFM was first recognized around 2010 as a seemingly novel condition (3, 4) and quickly grew into an alarming and important disease threat, with the first large outbreak occurring in 2014 (5). Since then, seasonal waves have occurred every other year in the United States, the largest occurring in 2018 (Fig. 1) (6–8)). Because of its uncertain cause and pathogenesis, enigmatic epidemiology, and limited treatment options, the disease captured national attention and triggered considerable concern among parents of young children.“

“AFM actually is a newly coined term for a subset of cases of the long-recognized syndrome of acute flaccid paralysis (AFP) (9, 10), in which cord myelitis is documented, typically by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) visualization (3, 11). The term AFP subsumes additional causes of flaccid paralysis such as trauma, tumors, and immunopathologic disorders. Clinical descriptions of AFP appeared in medical textbooks in 1789. Clusters of cases began to be recognized in 1840, with larger epidemics documented in Sweden in 1881 and in the United States in 1894. Early, widespread epidemics came to be referred to as “poliomyelitis” (“polio” for short, derived from the Greek words for inflammation of the neural gray matter).”

“Alternatively, local virus may cross the blood-brain barrier to extend proximally up nerve axons to the cord; this is believed to be the mechanism of ipsilateral trauma-associated “provocation poliomyelitis” (23). In addition, some NPEVs that spread by the respiratory route, including EV-D68, have low gastrointestinal tropism, hindering stool isolation (the standard poliovirus diagnostic technique).

It is noteworthy that while enterotropic polioviruses, and some other NPEVs that cause AFM, often can be isolated from stool for weeks, they, too, like nonenterotropic EV-D68, are uncommonly isolated from the CSF of paralytic cases (24). Similarly to epidemic polio, the AFM epidemic has been associated with cases of cranial nerve paralysis, bulbar paralysis, and meningoencephalitis (3, 20).”

“Perhaps, as has long been predicted, there is a “poliovirus niche” into which one or more NPEVs will evolve as we approach the eradication of polio (24, 39). It is conceivable that we may be seeing the early stages of such an evolution.”

https://mbio.asm.org/content/10/2/e00521-19

Of course, they try to make the caveat that this condition (i.e. PARALYSIS) commonly associated with Polio could not possibly have anything to do with Polio today due to it being on the “threshold of global eradication.” However, is Polio really on the verge of being eliminated or just reclassified from “wild type” Polio to “vaccine-derived?”

Polio Reclassified

According to Dr. Bernard Greenberg, head of the Department of Biostatistics of the University of North Carolina School of Public Health, the criteria for diagnosing Polio changed in order to make it a much more unlikely diagnosis:

In order to qualify for classification as paralytic poliomyelitis, the patient had to exhibit paralytic symptoms for at least 60 days after the onset of the disease. Prior to 1954, the patient had to exhibit paralytic symptoms for only 24 hours. Laboratory confirmation and the presence of residual paralysis were not required. After 1954, residual paralysis was determined 10 to 20 days and again 50 to 70 days after the onset of the disease. This change in definition meant that in 1955 we started reporting a new disease, namely, paralytic poliomyelitis with a longer lasting paralysis.¹

https://thevaccinereaction.org/2015/07/polio-wasnt-vanquished-it-was-redefined/#_edn1

Another source providing evidence to this reclassification and change in diagnostic criteria for Polio comes from the well-sourced book Immunization: The Reality Behind the Myth by James Walene. It shows that Polio cases were also reclassified as aseptic meningitis. I could not copy/paste the relevant sections but I have provided images from the book:

Asymptomatic Polio

On top of this reclassification, how many Polio cases are really being diagnosed today anyways? Even though the CDC claimed 72 out of 100 Polio cases are asymptomatic, it has been estimated that 99% of Polio cases have no symptoms of disease meaning people wouldn’t even know they have “it” in order to be tested and diagnosed:

“It’s estimated that 95 to 99 percent of people who contract poliovirus are asymptomatic. This is known as subclinical polio. Even without symptoms, people infected with poliovirus can still spread the virus and cause infection in others.”

https://www.healthline.com/health/poliomyelitis#symptoms

“One of the most startling statistics associated with non-paralytic polio is that up to 95 percent of polio cases had no symptoms at all! The vast majority of people who contracted the disease didn’t even know they had it! That means that people like many of us who grew up during the polio epidemic may have had polio without knowing it.”

“Less than 1 percent of all polio cases are paralytic, of which there are three types – spinal cord polio; polio in the brain stem (bulbar polio); or both, which is called bulbospinal polio. If the polio virus gets into the brain (bulbar), the muscle groups in the chest needed for breathing and swallowing became paralyzed. This was the most feared complication of the disease, and death often occurred at this point.”

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.argusleader.com/amp/104718400

So if we are to take them at their word that nearly all cases of Polio are asymptomatic, without a mass testing campaign such as we are seeing today with “SARS-COV-2,” there would be no way to know how many “real” Polio cases are out there in the world today.

Guillain-Barre = Polio

However, if we did regularly screen for Polio, the symptoms line up exactly with the flu so there would be no way to diagnose it clinically. Even paralysis, the defining symptom of Polio, is associated with the flu (and even the common cold):

Muscle weakness and paralysis

“Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) is an autoimmune disorder—which can be a complication of a serious case of the cold or flu—in which the body’s immune system attacks and destroys its nerves. As a result, muscle weakness and even paralysis can occur. Although the causes of the syndrome are unknown, some experts believe that it is triggered by bacterial or viral infection. GBS usually manifests 1-3 weeks after a viral infection, such as the cold or flu, but it may also occur following bacterial infection with Campylobacter.”

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.mdlinx.com/article/5-surprising-serious-cold-and-flu-complications/2RIynpqlR8Jo4EZElIIRmh&ved=2ahUKEwiAte-W1MvvAhXIZc0KHQscA68QFjABegQIAxAF&usg=AOvVaw1zcdAKrPFm_eIUqmsSFGWv

Diagnosing Polio

How many cases of the same symptoms of disease diagnosed as the flu are in actuality Polio cases? Neither the flu nor Polio are regularly screened for. Regarding the diagnosing and testing of Polio, the CDC states:

“Acute flaccid paralysis (AFP) is the manifestation of a wide spectrum of clinical diseases and is not nationally notifiable in the United States. Worldwide, children younger than 15 years are the age group at highest risk of developing polio and some other forms of AFP. Even in the absence of laboratory-documented poliovirus infection, AFP is expected to occur at a rate of at least 1 per 100,000 children annually. It can result from a variety of infectious and noninfectious causes.”

Consider polio in patients who have unexplained AFP.

“A probable case of polio is defined as an acute onset of flaccid paralysis of one or more limbs with decreased or absent tendon reflexes in the affected limbs, without other apparent cause, and without sensory or cognitive loss.”

https://www.cdc.gov/polio/what-is-polio/hcp.html

According to the CDC, Polio is only to be considered if all other possible causes of AFP have been ruled out. If healthcare providers do rule out all other possible causes and suspect Polio, this is how the CDC states that they test for it:

“Poliovirus can be detected in specimens from the throat, feces (stool), and occasionally cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) by isolating the virus in cell culture or by detecting the virus by polymerase chain reaction (PCR).

CDC laboratories conduct testing for poliovirus, including:

• Culture
• Intratypic differentiation
• Genome sequencing
• Serology

Virus isolation in culture is the most sensitive method to diagnose poliovirus infection. Poliovirus is most likely to be isolated from stool specimens. It may also be isolated from pharyngeal swabs. Isolation is less likely from blood or CSF.”

“Real-time reverse transcription PCR is used to differentiate possible wild strains from vaccine-like strains (“intratypic differentiation”), using virus isolated in culture as the starting material.

Partial genome sequencing is used to confirm the poliovirus genotype and determine its likely geographic origin.”

“Detection of poliovirus in CSF is uncommon. CSF usually contains an increased number of leukocytes [from 10 to 200 cells/mm³ (primarily lymphocytes)] and a mildly elevated protein (from 40 to 50 mg/dL). These findings are nonspecific and may result from a variety of infectious and noninfectious conditions.”

https://www.cdc.gov/polio/what-is-polio/lab-testing/diagnostic.html

It is interesting that the most accurate way to diagnose Polio is through stool samples rather than through the blood or cerebrospinal fluid. In fact, they claim isolation of the “virus” is uncommon in CSF. However, the original studies claiming isolation of the Polio “virus” stem from cultures of the emulsified brain and spinal column of a nine-year-old boy which was serially transferred through injections into the brains of monkeys who also had their brains and spines emulsified and injected into the craniums of other animals. All the while, a “virus” was assumed to be passed from the brain/spine goo to animal to animal using this disgusting process throughout the proceeding decades. If they now claim it is uncommon to find the “virus” in CSF cultures and that the results of CSF analysis are nonspecific and relate to other diseases as well, how can they claim that they had a Polio “virus” to begin with?

Diagnosing Flu

Polio, sharing the exact same symptoms as the flu, is only tested for if all other causes of AFP are not found. The flu, on the other hand, is normally diagnosed by symptoms alone rather than by testing, especially during the “flu season:”

“Your doctor will conduct a physical exam, look for signs and symptoms of influenza, and possibly order a test that detects influenza viruses.

During times when influenza is widespread, you may not need to be tested for influenza. Your doctor may diagnose you based on your signs and symptoms.”

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/flu/diagnosis-treatment/drc-20351725

“CDC does not know exactly how many people get sick with seasonal flu each year. There are several reasons for this, including that ILINet does not include every health care provider in the United States and that it monitors flu-like illness, not laboratory-confirmed flu cases. Also, seasonal flu illness is not a reportable disease, and not everyone who gets sick with flu seeks medical care or gets tested for flu.

To estimate the number of flu illnesses that occur in the United States each year, CDC uses mathematical modeling in combination with data from traditional flu surveillance systems. CDC estimates that from 2010 to 2020, flu has resulted in between 9 million and 41 million illnesses annually in the United States.

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/faq.htm

Polio is only diagnosed if all other causes of AFP are ruled out. The flu is normally diagnosed clinically without laboratory testing. If Polio was running around in the US, with the majority of the cases being asymptomatic and the ones that are symptomatic sharing the exact same flu-like symptoms confounding diagnosis, would we even know that this “virus” still existed here?

DDT Poisoning = Polio

Polio cases were already well on a decline before the toxic vaccines were introduced and there are alternative explanations as to the cause of Polio other than an unproven “virus,” such as the rampant use of the neurotoxic DDT at the time:

Polio, DDT, and Disease Risk in the United States after World War II 

“The National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (NFIP)—the nation’s large and powerful polio-fighting philanthropy—was “rushing three specially equipped trucks and three pumps to the Rockford area” to coat the city with DDT, the new war-developed pesticide. It would be “the first time,” said Gunderson, “that the powerful insecticide would be used to combat poliomyelitis.”

Rockford’s anti-polio DDT deployment, carried out by the US Army and a team of Yale polio researchers with support from the NFIP, was part of a roughly half decade of experimentation with the use of DDT to fight polio. Between the end of the Second World War and the early 1950s, researchers, municipal officials, and individuals from Savannah, Georgia, to Santa Monica, California, sprayed streets, alleys, yards, and homes with DDT to stop polio by killing flies, a suspected but debated actor in the disease’s transmission. Despite the prominent place of both polio and DDT in postwar US history, this episode has received scant attention from historians.”

“In Toxic Bodies, Nancy Langston asks how postwar Americans persuaded themselves “that it was a good idea to release millions of tons of chemicals known to be toxic into the environment.” She finds the answer in American assumptions about scientific expertise, the power and authority of such experts, and faith in “technical solutions” that were “cheap and above all, modern.”³ To Langston’s question, the story of DDT’s use against polio offers another answer: fear and uncertainty about a specific dreaded disease at a moment when etiological disease paradigms were making a complicated shift. DDT’s known and theoretical hazards to health were well publicized when the pesticide came on the US market in the summer of 1945: it was a potential threat to nature’s balance and a suspected threat to human health. But if DDT posed an uncertain threat, polio posed a certain one. And while polio, a disease of increasing epidemic severity, had an uncertain causal explanation, DDT had a certain health application—because it killed flies. In the context of epidemic polio, DDT’s health and environmental risks therefore receded as its domestic public health promise advanced.

Later in Toxic Bodies, Langston asks why authorities were slow to protect public health from the risks of postwar chemicals. The story of DDT’s use against polio suggests that at the start of this new “chemical regime of living,” authorities were in fact quick to act to protect public health—from polio, using a postwar chemical with known risks to do so.⁴ Rockford’s experimental results ultimately gave no scientific reason to spray with DDT, but in the years after it concluded, countless communities did so anyway. This decision to act on expectation over experimental evidence, this essay argues, reflected the fact that DDT was a war-born “brand” that benefited from ingrained germ consciousness, a boom in consumer culture and advertising, and the context of scientific uncertainty about polio causation, in which DDT’s availability enabled it to shape research and interventions focused on the disease.

“DDT became available to the American public as a disease preventive at the tail end of an era dominated by germ theory, at the advent of the golden era of US biomedicine, and at the beginning of a new era of ecological understanding of health. All at once, DDT was considered a modern tool, dubbed a wonder drug and a miracle akin to the atom bomb, and also labeled a disinfectant and employed in an approach to disease, namely sanitation, that belonged more to the late nineteenth century than the middle of the twentieth. Its use to fight polio thus illustrates the tensions among competing ideas about disease explanation and prevention in the years immediately following World War II.”

“Although polio’s and DDT’s histories overlap and intersect, in the historiographies on each, the other warrants only passing mentions at best. In David Kinkela’s work on DDT, polio appears briefly as the one exception to the rule of how healthy Americans had become by the 1940s, the decade of DDT’s debut: with once significant sources of death and disability—including tuberculosis, cholera, diphtheria, and malaria—in marked decline or at historic lows, this generation “was arguably the healthiest population in the nation’s history.” Only polio remained an “unexplained horror” (alongside cancer, also on the rise).⁶ In David Oshinky’s work on polio, DDT makes two brief appearances: first, as one of many tools employed in desperation against a 1949 outbreak in San Angelo, Texas, and again a few chapters (and three years) later, as a suspect in polio’s spread, given its environmental ubiquity.⁷ This contrast—between DDT as a possible solution to and possible cause of polio—paired with polio’s reputation as the last disease of a bygone era, captures how the two’s shared history points to an important moment of transition in both public health and etiologies of disease.”

https://academic.oup.com/envhis/article/22/4/696/4057684

When Texas Sprayed DDT On Citizens To Prevent Polio

“Yes, this happened in San Antonio, Texas. The director of the city’s Department of Health, H.L. Crittenden, ordered the spraying of DDT along every one of over a thousand streets in May, 1946 in an ill-fated attempt to wipe out polio.

A handful of other cities joined in, like Rockford, Illinois, and Paterson, New Jersey. Such an event came from the misguided notion that polio was spread by mosquitoes or other insects.”

https://allthatsinteresting.com/when-texas-sprayed-ddt

What is interesting to note is that DDT is still in use today, most widely in areas hit hardest by Polio such as Asia and Africa:

“DDT is still used today in South America, Africa, and Asia for this purpose. Farmers used DDT on a variety of food crops in the United States and worldwide. DDT was also used in buildings for pest control.”

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://npic.orst.edu/factsheets/ddtgen.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwjBws2KzsvvAhVXbc0KHa20Dt4QFjABegQIAxAG&usg=AOvVaw2Rab4SkRc0GC2fjxWXC19D

The neurotoxic effects of DDT are well known and include the usual Polio/flu symptoms of dizziness, headache, fatigue, and vomiting along with both paralysis and death:

“DDT poisoning can result in excitability, tremors, seizures, dizziness, headache, fatigue, vomiting and altered liver enzyme activity (ATSDR 2002a).”

“Neurotoxic effects of DDT include tremors, convulsion, paralysis, decreased central nervous system lipid, phospholipid and cholesterol content. DDT exposure early in life causes decreased growth, mortality, decreased levels of brain muscarinic acetylcholine receptors, increased spontaneous motor activity in adulthood and decreased learning.”

https://www.ewg.org/sites/humantoxome/chemicals/chemical.php?chemid=20007

In Summary:

• Most people who get infected with poliovirus (about 72 out of 100) will not have any visible symptoms
• About 1 out of 4 people (or 25 out of 100) with poliovirus infection will have flu-like symptoms 
• A smaller proportion of people (much less than one out of 100, or 1-5 out of 1000) with poliovirus infection will develop other, more serious symptoms that affect the brain and spinal cord
• Only people with the paralytic infection are considered to have Polio
• More children are paralyzed as a result of vaccine-derived infections than illnesses caused by the wildtype “virus“
• According to virologist Vincent Rancaniello: “It’s actually crazy because we’re vaccinating now against the vaccine in most parts of the world”
• Polio still exists today in the form of Acute Flaccid Myelitis, a rare but frightening polio-like illness that is striking more and more kids in the United States
• While it usually affects the limbs, in rare cases, AFM can affect the muscles in the respiratory system, making it difficult for children to breathe
• Most children have a mild respiratory illness or fever caused by a “viral” infection about one to four weeks before developing symptoms of acute flaccid myelitis
• Since 2014, acute flaccid myelitis (AFM), a long-recognized condition associated with polioviruses, nonpolio enteroviruses, and various other “viral” and nonviral causes, has been reemerging globally in epidemic form
• This unanticipated reemergence is ironic, given that polioviruses, once the major causes of AFM, are now at the very threshold of global “eradication” and cannot therefore explain any aspect of AFM reemergence
• AFM was first recognized around 2010 as a seemingly novel condition
• AFM’s cause and pathogenesis is uncertain, it has an enigmatic epidemiology, and limited treatment options
• AFM actually is a newly coined term for a subset of cases of the long-recognized syndrome of acute flaccid paralysis (AFP)
• Early, widespread epidemics of Acute Flaccid Paralysis came to be referred to as “poliomyelitis”
• In AFM, local “virus” may cross the blood-brain barrier to extend proximally up nerve axons to the cord; this is believed to be the mechanism of ipsilateral trauma-associated “provocation poliomyelitis”
• It is noteworthy that while enterotropic polioviruses, and some other NPEVs that cause AFM, often can be isolated from stool for weeks, they, too, like nonenterotropic EV-D68, are uncommonly isolated from the CSF of paralytic cases
• Similarly to epidemic polio, the AFM epidemic has been associated with cases of cranial nerve paralysis, bulbar paralysis, and meningoencephalitis
• Prior to 1954, the patient had to exhibit paralytic symptoms for only 24 hours and laboratory confirmation as well as the presence of residual paralysis were not required
• After 1954, residual paralysis was determined 10 to 20 days and again 50 to 70 days after the onset of the disease
• This change in definition meant that in 1955 clinicians started reporting a new disease, namely, paralytic poliomyelitis with a longer lasting paralysis
• Polio cases were also reclassified as aseptic meningitis
• It’s estimated that 95 to 99 percent of people who contract poliovirus are asymptomatic, which is known as subclinical polio
• Less than 1 percent of all polio cases are paralytic
• The defining symptom of disease separating Polio from the flu and common cold is paralysis, however this symptom in also associated with them and goes by the name Guillain-Barre Syndrome
• Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) is an autoimmune disorder—which can be a complication of a serious case of the cold or flu—in which the body’s immune system attacks and destroys its nerves, and as a result, muscle weakness and even paralysis can occur
• GBS usually manifests 1-3 weeks after a “viral” infection such as the cold or flu
• Polio and the flu are not regularly tested for
• According to the CDC, the defining symptom of Polio, acute flaccid paralysis, is the manifestation of a wide spectrum of clinical diseases and is not nationally notifiable in the United States
• Even in the absence of laboratory-documented poliovirus infection, AFP is expected to occur at a rate of at least 1 per 100,000 children annually
• It can result from a variety of infectious and noninfectious causes
• Healthcare providers are told only to consider Polio in patients who have unexplained AFP
• A probable case of polio is defined as an acute onset of flaccid paralysis of one or more limbs with decreased or absent tendon reflexes in the affected limbs, without other apparent cause
• If they rule out all other causes, the CDC claims Polio can be detected in specimens from the throat, feces (stool), and occasionally cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) by isolating the “virus” in cell culture or by detecting the “virus” by polymerase chain reaction (PCR)
• Poliovirus is most likely to be isolated from stool specimens but it may also be isolated from pharyngeal swabs while isolation is less likely from blood or CSF
• Inaccurate, not-to-be-used-for-diagnosis real-time reverse transcription PCR is used to differentiate possible wild strains from vaccine-like strains
• Partial (not whole) genome sequencing is used to confirm the poliovirus genotype and determine its likely geographic origin
• Detection of Polio in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) is uncommon and these findings are nonspecific and may result from a variety of infectious and noninfectious conditions
• The flu, which shares the same symptoms as Polio, is usually diagnosed by clinical symptoms alone
• The CDC does not know exactly how many people get sick with seasonal flu each year
• ILINet does not include every health care provider in the United States and that it monitors flu-like illness, not laboratory-confirmed flu cases
• The seasonal flu illness is not a reportable disease
• To estimate the number of flu illnesses that occur in the United States each year, CDC uses mathematical modeling in combination with data from traditional flu surveillance systems
• An alternative explanation for the rise in Polio cases in the 1940’s and 50’s point to the introduction and rampant use of the insecticide DDT to combat Polio
• Between the end of the Second World War and the early 1950s, researchers, municipal officials, and individuals from Savannah, Georgia, to Santa Monica, California, sprayed streets, alleys, yards, and homes with DDT to stop polio by killing flies, a suspected but debated actor in the disease’s transmission
• DDT’s known and theoretical hazards to health were well publicized when the pesticide came on the US market in the summer of 1945: it was a potential threat to nature’s balance and a suspected threat to human health
• The story of DDT’s use against polio suggests that at the start of this new “chemical regime of living,” authorities were in fact quick to act to protect public health—from polio, using a postwar chemical with known risks to do so
• Experimental results ultimately gave no scientific reason to spray with DDT, but countless communities did so anyway
• DDT became available to the American public as a disease preventive at the tail end of an era dominated by germ theory, at the advent of the golden era of US biomedicine
• Its use to fight polio thus illustrates the tensions among competing ideas about disease explanation and prevention in the years immediately following World War II
• Although polio’s and DDT’s histories overlap and intersect, DDT’s use warrants only passing mentions at best
• In David Oshinky’s work on polio, DDT makes two brief appearances: first, as one of many tools employed in desperation against a 1949 outbreak in San Angelo, Texas, and again a few chapters (and three years) later, as a suspect in polio’s spread
• There was a contrast between DDT as a possible solution to and possible cause of Polio
• The director of the city’s Department of Health, H.L. Crittenden, ordered the spraying of DDT along every one of over a thousand streets in May, 1946 in an ill-fated attempt to wipe out polio
• A handful of other cities joined in, like Rockford, Illinois, and Paterson, New Jersey in an event that came from the misguided notion that polio was spread by mosquitoes or other insects
• DDT poisoning can result in excitability, tremors, seizures, dizziness, headache, fatigue, vomiting and altered liver enzyme activity
• Neurotoxic effects of DDT include tremors, convulsion, paralysis, decreased central nervous system lipid, phospholipid and cholesterol content. DDT exposure early in life causes decreased growth, mortality, decreased levels of brain muscarinic acetylcholine receptors, increased spontaneous motor activity in adulthood and decreased learning

It’s safe to say that the symptoms of Polio are still present and accounted for today, even in the US where it was supposedly eradicated but was instead reclassified as either Acute Flaccid Myelitis or Guillain-Barre Snydrome. It is admitted that the vaccines are producing the exact same disease in children, especially in third world countries. The actual symptoms of Polio line up with the flu, including paralysis, and even the common cold. Also like the flu, it is largely an asymptomatic disease (up to 99%) and is not regularly tested for in labs. People are apparently walking around thinking they are healthy when in fact they are unknowingly “spreading” Polio around to the general populace. There are also alternative explanations for the cause and decline of Polio such as the rampant use of DDT in the 40’s and 50’s until its eventual banning in the US in 1972. DDT poisoning produces the exact same symptoms of disease associated with Polio and was regularly sprayed on children as a “miracle cure.”

Polio was not conquered. As with many diseases before and after it, the symptoms of disease were reclassified under new names and the criteria for diagnosis changed. What was known as Polio still exists today. You just won’t hear about it regularly by name.