Can Polioviruses Cause Chronic Fatigue?

A Bruno Byte
From Richard L. Bruno, HD, PhD
Director, International Centre for Polio Education

Question:

Have you heard of a Dr. William Campbell Douglas and his contention that polio "may be with us again in a disguised form" and that the oral polio vaccine is causing chronic fatigue?

Dr. Bruno’s Response:

I have read Dr. Douglas' comments. He says polio is "more common than ever." But I don't think he means that the three polioviruses are more common, or that the oral vaccine is causing chronic fatigue. But there is clear evidence that “polioviruses” are "with us again in a disguised form." This all requires some explanation.

First of all there is a problem of which we're all aware: the oral polio vaccine can (although rarely) cause paralytic polio. Once in about 125,000,000 doses the inactivated live poliovirus in the oral polio vaccine mutates and becomes active, getting inside and damaging neurons, causing the very symptoms it was intended to prevent. The outbreaks of polio in Pakistan, Afghanistan and even New Guinea make clear that the oral polio vaccine can be dangerous. Even so, it still is the most powerful tool to fight polio; the world would not have seen a 99.9% reduction in cases of polio had it not been for the oral polio vaccine. Vaccination must continue and all children must be vaccinated for decades after the last case of polio has been reported.

However, unless the inactivated vaccine strain of poliovirus mutates and becomes active, there is absolutely no evidence that the oral polio vaccine does any damage to neurons. And, unless there is neuronal damage there can't be any symptoms, be they of paralytic polio, "non-paralytic" polio or the brain stem damage our research suggests causes chronic fatigue in polio survivors. This is not to say that Dr. Douglas isn't on the right track about "polio" being with us “in a disguised form” and that the oral polio vaccine is indirectly "causing" chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), also called myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME). This is because something unexpected, frightening and totally unrecognized happened after the injectable polio vaccine was distributed: the number of cases of CFS went through the roof.

British infectious disease specialist Elizabeth Dowsett plotted the cases of ME she and ME pioneer Melvin Ramsay had seen in their practice since 1919 against reported cases of polio in England. When the Salk and then Sabin vaccines brought the yearly number of British polio cases below 25 in the early 1960s, the number of ME patients took off. In Ramsay's and Dowsett's practice alone, between 1960 and 1980 the number of ME patients increased by fifty times. Between 1980 and 1990, the number of patients with ME increased yet again by a factor of fifty!

What's more, throughout the world 32 ME/CFS outbreaks were recorded after the polio vaccine was distributed. So there is something about the polio vaccine that is related to chronic fatigue. What is that something? It appears that the vaccine that eliminated polio had an unintended consequence. The elimination of the three types of poliovirus left a vacuum in the intestines where the viruses grew. Just as a flock of dominant and aggressive blue jays blocks less aggressive robins from roosting in your back yard, poliovirus are the “blue jays” of enteroviruses, the viruses that live and grow in your intestines. When poliovirus "blue jays" disappeared from your intestines thanks to the vaccine, other enterovirus "robins" took over the poliovirus' old intestinal breeding ground and filled the vacuum.

With the polioviruses gone, other enteroviruses were able to multiply, spill into the bloodstream and enter the central nervous system. In 1990 Dr. Dowsett looked for antibodies to non-polio enterovirus in her ME patients. Fifty percent had antibodies to the first non-polio enterovirus ever discovered -- the Coxsackie B virus -- named after Coxsackie, New York, the town where it was found to have paralyzed children in 1948. Yes, paralyzed. It is not just the 3 polioviruses that enter and kill neurons in the spinal cord and brain stem. Neuron damage, weakness, paralysis and symptoms of brain fatigue caused by non-polio enteroviruses can be so similar as to be indistinguishable from the actions of polioviruses. One Coxsackie virus, named A7, produces paralytic symptoms so similar to polio that it has been named “Poliovirus Type IV." Other enteroviruses that cause damage and symptoms similar to the polioviruses include all of the other Coxsackie viruses, the ECHO viruses (which in 1956 were the first viruses associated with a CFS outbreak), Enterovirus 71 and DV-68, which around 2015 possibly has caused some are outbreaks of respiratory illness, muscle weakness and even paralysis in several hundred American children.

One piece of evidence directly links an enterovirus to CFS and damage to the neurons that activate the brain. Sadly, the evidence comes from a CFS patient who took her own life. Traces of Coxsackie B virus -- the same virus for which Dr. Dowsett found antibodies in her ME patients -- was found in both the hypothalamus and brain stem, the very heart of the brain activating system which our and others' research found is damage in polio survivors with fatigue and in patients with CFS/ME.

So the "disguised form" that polio may be talking is not a disguise at all but replacement of polioviruses by other enterovirus. The oral polio vaccine could be "causing" chronic fatigue syndrome by making way for other enterovirus to grow in the intestines and be able to do damage like that done by the poliovirus, except that the damage is most frequently found in brain activating system neurons and cases fatigue, not in the spinal cord causing paralysis.