Nexus - 0303 - New Times Magazine-pages

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The discovery that vaccines are contaminated with disease- causing amoebas should warrant a complete reassessment of immunisation policies. elevision newsreels all over Australia in January 1996 reported on the deaths of two five-year-old children, one in Adelaide and one in Tasmania, from "brain- eating amoebas". Listening to these startling reports, I remembered that when I was writing my book, Vaccination, and studying medical papers dealing with the contamination by monkey viruses of the monkey kidney tissues used in the production of the polio vaccine, one of the articles mentioned Acanthamoeba as yet another contaminant of these tissue cultures, besides the well-known and well-publicised simian viruses SV1- SV40. As a matter of curiosity, I looked up the paper written by Hull et al. (1958) in my files, and there it was, on page 35: “Recently an ameba was isolated from monkey kidney tis- sue cultures and was identified as belonging to the genus Acanthamoeba. It grew readily in tissue cultures... It appeared to have the ability to infect and kill monkeys and mice fol- lowing intracerebral and intraspinal inoculation." Within a short period of time I was able to locate dozens more medical papers dealing with the pathogenicity of these amoebas in animals and, even more importantly, also in humans. For Jet's not forget that millions of children all over the world had been injected or orally administered a number of viral vaccines, and the polio vaccine in particular, cul- tured on the monkey kidneys. The discovery that vaccines CONTAMINATION OF BIOLOGICALS, INCLUDING VACCINES Contamination of vaccines by animal micro-organisms has been plaguing vaccine pro- duction from the very start and has been implicated in a number of serious diseases, leukaemia, cancer, SSPE (subacute sclerosing pan encephalitis) and even AIDS being the most prominent examples. As recently as 1993, a journal called Vaccine published an article which admitted that “Virus-contaminated cell cultures are a major problem in the bio-industry... Cell cultures can be permanently virus-infected, or can become infected, usually through the use of contaminated sera." WHAT ARE AMOEBAS? Amoebas are one-cell organisms—protozoans. According to an excellent review by Ma et al. (1990), amoebic protozoans are classified in the phyllum Sarcomastigophora. They also belong to Rhizopoda, meaning as equipped by propulsive pseudopodia and/or by pro- toplasmic flow without production of pseudopodia. Acanthopodina, a suborder of the order of Amoebida, form two families: Vahlkampfiidae and Acanthoamoebidae with two genera, Naegleria and Acanthamoeba respectively. A number of species have been recognised belonging to either of these genera. Depending on living conditions, Naegleria species form three life-stages: trophozoite, flagellate and cyst. In contrast to this, Acanthamoeba species form only two life-stages: trophozoite and cyst. Initially, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, amoebas were considered harmless. The first mention of “Free-living amoebae as contaminants in monkey-kidney tissue cultures" is that by Jahnes, Fullmer and Li (1957). Jahnes et al. (1957) isolated two strains of apparently the same amoeba from monkey kidney tissue cultures. They looked like rounded bodies, simular in appearance to cells manifesting changes induced by certain simian (monkey) viruses. However, on closer examination, they proved to be amoebic cysts. The cysts varied in size, usually from 10 to 21 microns in diameter. In one experi- ment, the cysts were treated with 10% formalin, washed and inoculated into monkey kid- ney tissue culture tubes. The monkey kidney cells fagocytised the cysts. The tropho- ©1996 by Viera Scheibner, Ph.D. 178 Govetts Leap Road Blackheath, NSW 2785 Australia Phone +61 (0)47 87 8203 Fax +61 (0)47 87 8988 178 Govetts Leap Road Blackheath, NSW 2785 Australia Phone +61 (0)47 87 8203 Fax +61 (0)47 87 8988 APRIL-MAY 1996 NEXUS * 43