AFMA Americans
for Medical Advancement
March 2006
Didn't the polio vaccine come from animal experimentation?
Animal experimentation actually delayed this much-needed vaccine
throughout the first half of the twentieth century.
Polio first broke out around 1835, with victims rapidly becoming paralyzed
and dying. In 1840, an orthopedic surgeon wrote that the spinal cord was the
seat of infection, a hypothesis that was proven twenty-three years later.
In 1908, scientists suggested that a virus was responsible, a virus that
might be eradicated with a vaccine. In developing a vaccine, it is very
important to determine how the infection enters the body and takes hold. You
cannot interrupt its contagion unless you determine its path. Pathologists
discovered the poliovirus in human intestines as early as 1912, which
suggested it might enter humans through the digestive track.
Meanwhile researchers successfully infected animals with polio. This
"triumph" wound up postponing the development of an efficacious vaccine by
decades. As it turned out, our close relatives the monkeys contracted polio
nasally (not through the digestive system), and the virus moved directly
from the nose to the brain. Incredibly, the scientists working on the
vaccine chose to ignore the human digestive data in favor of the monkey
data!
The pro-animal experimenters are not incorrect when they claim that a polio
vaccine was derived from animal experiments because in 1934, a polio vaccine
manufactured from monkey tissue was released. What they fail to mention is
that it resulted in twelve people being paralyzed and six deaths. In 1937,
animal experiments led scientists to spray zinc sulfate and picric acid alum
into children's noses, reasoning that if the human transmission route was
via the nasal mucosa as it was in monkeys, this would kill the virus in the
nose. The only result was that some children permanently lost their sense of
smell. In 1941, thirty years after the original animal experiments, Dr.
Albert Sabin worked with autopsy findings to demonstrate that the human
nasal mucosa did not have virus. What he did find was that the virus was
confined to the gastrointestinal tract, as had been determined nearly thirty
years prior. Years later, Dr. Sabin recalled the folly of the monkey models
for polio:
Paralytic polio could be dealt with only by preventing the irreversible
destruction of the large number of motor nerve cells, and the work on
prevention was long delayed by the erroneous conception of the nature of the
human disease based on misleading experimental models of the disease in
monkeys.
In 1949, John Enders grew the virus in tissue culture. This paved the way
for vaccine. For this achievement he won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or
Medicine in 1954.
The vaccine could have been produced from non-animal tissue, however
manufacturers opted for monkey kidney tissue instead. The older animal-based
vaccine contained live virus, causing 204 people to contract polio, and
eleven documented deaths.
The polio vaccine is now grown in human diploid-cell culture instead of in
animal tissue.
Return to Animal Rights Articles
Read more at Alternatives to Animal Testing, Experimentation and Dissection