Polio Vaccinations & Oral Drops between 1989 - 2000, how safe were they?

[Beaaware]

Been reading an article from The Guardian dated 18/12/2001, what I never knew was that 2 teenagers who died from the human form of mad cows disease (vCJD) had been inoculated from the same batch of oral polio vaccines seven years previously. The vaccines were grown from foetal calf serum.
Quoted from the article "The vaccine concerned should not have been on the market when it was administered to the variant CJD patients in 1994. Guidance dating back to 1989 said bovine material in vaccines should be sourced from BSE free countries, even though it took four years for many older stocks to work through.
However, the polio vaccines remained on the market unitl October 2000 because the guidance only referred directly to injectable vaccines, not oral ones. Tough laws introduced this year (2001) closed the loophole.The connection emerged from a study of 5 CJD victims who lived at some time in or near the Eastleugh area of Southampton. They had doses from a 60-70,000 dose batch of the oral vaccine in late 1994."

This is very alarming, since the outbreak of BSE in 1985, Polio vaccines containing bovine material were not withdrawn until 2000, for 15 years how many children were exposed to the risk of vCJD and may now be harbouring the vCJD prions, why did our health ministers allow this to happen, why did'nt they act sooner? One death from vCJD is one death to many, they played russian roulette with so many young lives and many young people have died from simply having a vaccination, it's scandalous.

Might be worth linking to some of the more recent media coverage of this issue.

Thanks DBennett but this information does not suggest a 0% risk from the oral polio vaccinations, I strongly believe that vCJD is linked to the Polio Oral vaccines during the 1980's & up until 2000.

Here is a quote from The Guardian Magazine:

BSE IS PROBABLY THE MOST CYNICAL ACT OF BIOLOGICAL WARFARE EVER WAGED AGAINST A CIVILIAN POPULATION BY A WESTERN GOVERNMENT.

Many young people aged around 21 - 24 years of age have recently died from the human form of mad cows disease, professionals are reluctant to recgonise that this disease is the cause of their illness and reluctant to admit that vaccines have anything to do with it. But sadly today in 2010 people are dying from vCJD, a manmade infectious brain destroying disease.
Thankyou Kenneth Clarke

Well that is what Kevin Toolis thinks
anyway.
Although the main thrust of his article seems to be the meat industry, not vaccines.

The rest of that paragraph spells that out:

"BSE is probably the most cynical act of biological warfare ever waged against a civilian population by a western government. The British government put the narrow business interests of its farming and meat industries before the health of its own population, and that of other countries. MBM was identified as the source of the infection as early as 1988 and its use as cattle feed was banned in Britain. But that did not stop British exporters, with the blessing of the British government, selling 56,000 tonnes of their lethal product to their fellow Europeans over the next six years."

And polio vaccine are only mentioned twice in the whole article and neither are strong proponets as a CJD risk.

"The victims' age range - Stacey, the youngest, was 18 and Glen Day, the oldest, was 35 - meant that they were unlikely to have received the same batch of childhood vaccinations, such as polio, that had utilised bovine serum, ruling out another potential route of BSE infection."

"But cow by-products end up in a bewildering range of everyday items, from the jelly in pastries to office furniture. Bovine serum is used in the manufacture of insulin and polio vaccines."

But this is a newspaper report (well lifestyle magazine report) so not the best reference for a medical issue.

Pubmed has no record of any cases of vCJD linked to polio.
And lots of reasons why it's biologically implausable.
The vCJD study groups set up at the time founnd no link from cases from the initial group of sufferers.

What leads you to think that vCJD & polio vaccines could be linked?

DBennett, no doubt you will strongly dispute my reasons for believing that there is a link between polio vaccines & vCJD, may I suggest you read about vaccines on this website as I have'nt got time to spell it out for you on here, www.justiceforandy.com

Of course vCJD has not only been linked to vaccines but many other routes of transmission as I am sure you are aware of. What has become very obvious to me is that a lot of information is kept out of the public domain regarding vCJD, many victims are not even put on the official statistics, we have vCJD surveillance teams operating, I think that says it all really.

There seems to be very little about vaccines on that website, although it is difficult to be sure as there is no site map or search function.
I found a couple of unsupported assertions here and here not anything that can be verified.

Now I'm not sure what other routes of transmission you're referring to (the website contains around 20 possibilities, again with little way of verifying the facts behind the statements) but on the role of vaccines there does not appear to be any reason to think there is a causative link.

Such a link may be hard to find but the best evidence available seems to indicate it very unlikely.