Poliomyelitis in Domestic Animals
Were humans the only ones affected?
“Medical reports have shown repeatedly that paralytic diseases in horses, pigs, dogs, cats, ducks, chickens, etc. occur simultaneously in districts where epidemics of poliomyelitis are prevalent.”
We are told by the medical establishment that humans are the only ones who can be affected by polio:
“Hundreds of diseases can be transmitted between insects, animals and humans. One of the things that makes polio eradicable is the fact that humans are the only reservoir. No poliovirus has been found to exist and spread among animals despite repeated attempts to document this.”
Is this really true?
Most of the attempts by early polio researchers to “infect” lab animals of different species with polio were unsuccessful;
“Attempts to transmit the disease [polio] to the usual laboratory animals, such as rabbits, guinea pigs, or mice, failed.”
“Many guinea-pigs and rabbits, one horse, two calves, three goats, three pigs, three sheep, six rats, six mice, six dogs, and four cats have had active virus introduced in the brain but without causing any appreciable effect whatever. These animals have been under observation for many weeks.”
Even for those animal species that did exhibit a polio-like disease, the “infection” could hardly be called natural. The assumed “virus” had to be artificially injected into the abdominal cavity or brain in order for the animals to come down with paralysis.
The outcomes of these experiments, which were consistent from researcher to researcher, led scientists to believe that polio was unique to humans, that is, it doesn’t naturally exist in animals.
This perception may have been the reason that science ignored a remarkable phenomenon frequently mentioned in reports of the early outbreaks: Domestic animals were frequently paralyzed at the same time humans were struck by polio.
Paralysis in domestic animals was reported as early as the first major outbreak on US soil. In his report of the outbreak in Vermont in the summer of 1894, Dr. Charles Caverly notes that;
“During this epidemic and in the same geographical area, an acute nervous disease, paralytic in its nature, affected domestic animals. Horses, dogs and fowls died with these symptoms.”
A pathological examination of a fowl with paralyzed legs and wings revealed findings of “acute poliomyelitis of the lumbar portion of the cord.”
“That domestic animals suffered with human beings in our epidemic,” Caverly adds, “is a noteworthy fact and one, so far as I can learn, hitherto unobserved. That such was the case cannot be doubted.”
Caverly, who served on Vermont’s board of health for another 24 years following the 1894 outbreak, also reports paralysis in farm animals during polio outbreaks in the state in 1910 (calves and pigs) and 1914 (cows, chickens, dogs, and pigs). He concludes:
“Instances of paralysis among domestic animals have always been noted as accompanying our outbreaks of human infantile paralysis.”
Dr. Robert Lovett, who authored reports on polio outbreaks in Massachusetts, also mentions instances of paralysis in farm animals. In his report of the 1908 outbreak, he mentions a mother and daughter who contracted polio “shortly after an epidemic of ‘leg weakness’ in the chickens of the household.”
Two years later in a report on the 1910 outbreak, Lovett notes that out of 110 families affected by polio who kept farm animals “34 [families] had illness, paralysis or death in 82 animals near the time of the human paralysis.”
In their 1914 book entitled A Manual of Infantile Paralysis: With Modern Methods of Treatmenton polio, Frauenthal and Manning devote several pages to morbidity of pets and farm animals that occurred in parallel with the disease in humans. In addition to Caverly and Lovett’s reports reviewed above, they mention 15 other polio outbreaks – in the US, Sweden, England, and Brazil – that also involved paralysis of domestic animals. Among the animals affected were horses, cows, chickens, cats, dogs, pigs, and sheep.
For example, during a 1909 polio outbreak in Minnesota, Dr. Hill, the state’s chief epidemiologist, described a paralytic illness in three colts that was “strongly analogous in clinical history and symptoms to the disease in the human.”
Dr. Shore, the veterinarian who treated these colts, writes,
“In my veterinary practice of the past five or six years I have found a disease appearing among one- or two- year-old colts that shows a line of symptoms corresponding closely to anterior poliomyelitis in children. I have had from 5 to 10 cases a year during this time, always occurring during the summer months, and the majority of them during the month of August. The affected colts are usually found in the pasture unable to stand.”
In California, Frauenthal and Manning write, there were 100 cases of polio in humans in 1910, most of them in San Joaquin County. At the same time, according to a California State Board of Health bulletin, there were numerous reports from veterinarians describing “a considerable number of puzzling paralyses of colts in San Joaquin County.”
A report of a polio outbreak in Iowa in 1910–1911 describes a large number of cases of paralysis in chickens concurrent with paralytic disease in humans. In a pathological examination of the spinal cord of a fowl with paralysis in two legs and one wing, “The histological picture was that of acute poliomyelitis in man.”
In a 1912 article entitled The Correlation Of Epidemic Paralysis in Animal and Man published in The Medical Times, Jacolyn Van Vliet Manning reported that “a close relationship between paralytic cases in man and animal during epidemics of poliomyelitis has been observed in nine Western states of the United States” as well as abroad, in Sweden, England, and Northwestern Germany.
Ivar Wickman reported that in the polio outbreak in Sweden (1903) there were many cases of dogs being paralyzed along with children.
In his 1936 report on polio in Kentucky, Dr. Lumsden outlines a number of instances where chickens, turkeys and dogs and a squirrel were simultaneously affected with paralysis. One example:
“Several hundred chickens and turkeys on the place died from “limberneck” in July and August, the outbreak among them beginning about 2 weeks before the onset of the case of poliomyelitis in the boy.”
Almost 60 years after Charles Caverly reported paralysis in farm animals during the polio outbreak in Vermont, Dr. Biskind describes a similar phenomenon:
“Since the last war there have been a number of curious changes in the incidence of certain ailments and the development of new syndromes never before observed. A most significant feature of this situation is that both man and all his domestic animals have simultaneously been affected.”
In humans, he notes, among other things, a sharp increase in polio morbidity and conditions of extreme fatigue and muscle weakness. As for domestic animals, he lists a number of diseases that became common after the war that were not mentioned in the Keeping Livestock Healthy handbook published by the US Department of Agriculture in 1942. “This coincidence alone,” he writes, “should have been sufficient to rouse a suspicion that something new that is common both to man and his domestic animals, has been operating in their environment during the period these changes have occurred.”
Thanks Turtles All The Way Down: Vaccine Science and Myth for useful information.