Welcome to Straight Talk on Health. I’m your host Dr. Chet Zelasko. Straight Talk on Health is a joint production with WGVU in Grand Rapids MI. I examine the practical application of health information. Nutrition. Exercise. Diet. Supplementation. I look at the science behind them, and let you know whether it’s something to consider or not. You can check out other things that I do on my website Drchet.com and sign up for my free emails.
In 1911, a physician named Peyton Rous discovered that a microbe, found in a tumor in chicken, was able to infect other chickens causing the same cancer. His findings were claimed to be ridiculous as cancer was not caused by a microbe so his research stopped. Those microbes were called viruses in later years.
Move forward to the 1950s. A scientist working for the VA named Ludwig Gross picked up the research. He established that viruses did cause cancer in several species of animals. What he did not prove was how that was possible. He spent much of his career trying to prove that viruses could cause cancer in humans. The problem was that it went against the central dogma. That dogma stated that DNA could result in the production of RNA but RNA could not go backward and interfere with DNA. How could it cause itself to insert itself in the DNA? Without the how, it wasn’t possible to establish that viruses caused cancer in humans.
In the early 1970s, two scientists from different labs discovered a piece of the virus that could retroactively insert itself into the cell DNA and make it a cancer cell. They called that reverse transcriptase and it led to the term retroviruses. Drrs. Howard Temin and David Baltimore won Nobel Prizes for that discovery.
Now the science turned to finding a retrovirus in humans. Dr. Robert Gallo discovered just such a retrovirus in two different humans. He submitted his paper to the Journal of Virology. It was rejected on September 15th, 1980. Remember that date.
During the early 1980s, there was a disease that seemed to be impacting primarily gay men. At that moment, catching the virus was almost always a death sentence. Dr. Gallo turned his attention to this new virus and co-discovered what became called the Human Immunodeficiency virus or HIV for short, the virus that causes Acquired Immunodeficiency Disorder AKA AIDS. That was in 1984. Four years after he demonstrated that a retrovirus caused a form of blood cancer leukemia in humans.
Those lost years delayed the test for HIV, also discovered by Gallo. By 1995, there was a blend of drugs that could arrest HIV and today, while there is no vaccine yet, HIV is blocked by drugs that prevents it from replicating itself.
Four years were lost because science stopped. More correctly stated, science didn’t stop but those scientists who would have been attracted to the research problem didn’t because there was limited funding for that type of research. Ryan White, a young boy from Indiana died on April 8th, 1990 from AIDS. If you don’t remember him, you may remember Freddie Mercury who died of AIDS on November 11th, 1991. Maybe they would have lived if science hadn’t slowed for 4 years. Slowed until 1983 when Dr. Anthony Fauci became the head of infectious diseases in response to a President Reagan initiative. Yes. That Dr. Fauci who made conquering infectious diseases his life’s mission.
Let’s look at another example but told a different way. Let’s say that based on prior experience or even just a hunch, you work with a group of researchers to study the relationship between a live measles vaccination and digestive issues like inflammatory bowel disease. Using data from a medical database, you identify patients who were vaccinated in a single year--1964. Because the database is connected to the health care system, you can divide the groups into those who were vaccinated versus those who were not. You then find that the vaccinated group were three times more likely to develop bowel inflammation.
But you’re faced with a dilemma. You haven’t proven cause and effect because you can’t in these types of observational trials. You need to do clinical trials, first, to develop a test for assessing the presences of the live measles virus in the large intestine That could take years to validate the test.. Then, you have to establish how the measles vaccine contributes to the bowel inflammation. After that, you need to do clinical trials to test the hypothesis. That could result in years and years of research to develop the test and do the clinical trials.
Or, you could find another way if your goal was owning the patent for the test for the measles virus in the intestines. The sales of the test would make you wealthy as well as any investors in the testing business. It could only be purchased from one company at least until the patent ran out.
What do you do? You might chose an alternative approach. You could work with an anti-vaccination group and a law firm to bring lawsuits against the vaccine manufacturer’s to generate revenue. Instead of focusing just on gut issues, you could do a study that establishes that the vaccine using live virus causes autism within a week of vaccination. Not just any autism but retrograde autism where the child regresses neurologically. You also don’t limit it to just the measles vaccine; you include mumps, measles and rubella AKA MMR vaccine. What if in your haste to see the lawsuits proceed you didn’t exactly follow the research guidelines that were set in the methodology. What if the parents knew they would be part of a lawsuit that could provide care for the child?
In 1998, Andrew Wakefield and colleagues published an article in the medical journal Lancet suggesting that there was a relationship between the digestive issues such as bowel inflammation, the MMR vaccine, and autism. Since the press conference to announce the findings and publication of the paper, vaccinations have come under attack as a cause of autism. That paper, which was retracted some 12 years later due to fraudulent data, has become the battle cry for the anti-vaccine believers throughout the world.
But science didn’t really stop. It’s just been ignored. See if you’ve heard about this study published in 2002. In it, researchers used data collected from the Danish National Board of Health between 1991-1998. There were just over 537,000 children born during that time with 82% vaccinated with the measles vaccine. The autism status was obtained from the psychiatric central register. A total of 538 children were diagnosed with autism or autistic spectrum disorder. Comparing the vaccinated group with the unvaccinated group revealed that the relative risk was .92 for autism and .83 for autistic spectrum disorder. That’s correct: the risk of any form of autism was lower in the vaccinated group. Also important, there was no association between age of vaccination and any timeline as to the development of autism. This was not the only study that showed no relationship vaccinations and autism. A follow-up study in Denmark published in 2019 the same outcome. No relationship between the MMR vaccine and autism.
Yet the anti-vaccination people cling to the Wakefield results based on 12 hand-picked subjects. The real tragedy according to one scientist was the energy, emotion, and money that have been diverted away from efforts to understand the real causes of autism and how to help children and families who live with it.
Fortunately the scientific process has continued to find the actual cause of autism. The process is slow. A review article published in 2023 identified that autism can be attributed to inheritance genetics and environmental factors influenced by epigenetics or dietary factors. The challenge? They estimate that over 800 genes and dozens of genetic syndromes are associated with ASD. That’s going to take time and money.
The science related to health must continue unimpeded by government politics. I’ve illustrated how just a four year delay resulted in the deaths of many from the HIV infection and a 12 year battle with a fraudulent scientist resulted in the decline in vaccinations. There is no hitting pause because the result will be an increase of diseases attributable to the viruses and pathogens we know and those yet to come. Some food for thought. That’s it for this episode. Until next time, this is Dr. Chet Zelasko saying health is a choice. Choose wisely today and every day.
Revisionist History. Malcolm Gladwell. The Obscure Virus Club provided the basis for the HIV and AIDS timeline. Every scientific article and fact was independently verified by the podcast author.
Lancet. 1995 Apr 29;345(8957):1071-4.
Lancet. 1998 Feb 28;351(9103):637-41.
N Engl J Med. 2002 Nov 7;347(19):1477-82. doi: 10.1056/NEJMoa021134.
Ann Intern Med. 2019 Apr 16;170(8):513-520. doi: 10.7326/M18-2101.
Genes. 2023,14,677. https://doi.org/ 10.3390/genes14030677
