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Dusty:Starlight:Culture



Killer Monkey Kidneys
2004-06-24   6:14 p.m.

When my dad was diagnosed with mesothelioma in the early 90's, everyone scratched their head. It's a very, very rare cancer of the lining of the lung, and doesn't operate like normal cancers. Treatments were few and far between since it's such a rare form of cancer, and those that did exist were highly toxic.

Where did it come from? How on earth did he get it? It seemed to be the million dollar question. You see, mesothelioma was the construction worker's disease, was the coal miner's disease. It comes from repeated, habitual, and heavy exposure to carcinogenic inhalants and substances like asbestos. My father was neither a construction worker nor a coal miner. He was a music teacher, and a musician, with a relatively healthy lifestyle.

"It's all the second hand smoke", my mother had said, referring to the jazz clubs or parties he'd play at. Well that would make sense had he had lung cancer. A non-specific, random form; something that had developed over time.

But mesothelioma? The doctors said it had been in his system for years and years and years - for longer than I'd been alive, at the time - making itself known only in what seemed like the last moments of his life. I forgot to mention how fast it kills its victims. We found out he had it and then in months, he was gone. We soothed ourselves by thinking it must have been the asbestos covered pipes in the house where he grew up -- yes surely, that was it. It gave us peace to think so, to blame something. Damned house. F-ing Pipes.

But everyone I talked to, professional or no, said that "didn't make sense". Besides, he had three other siblings, two parents, a dog...all of whom were and are mesothelioma free.

Even now, it seems to stump doctors. When I go to a new PCP, OB-GYN, Dentist, or other medical professional for whom I have to fill out paper work and check the "yes" box under the question "Has anyone in your immediate family died of cancer?", the doctor always asks me what kind. I say "mesothelioma" and they say "huh!", and ask if my father was in construction. I say no and they pause, and then start to ask me whatever relative questions that pertain to my visit, dropping the subject, moving on.

In my car last week, I heard the word "mesothelioma" on the radio and turned the volume up. It was spoken, I later found out, by the voice of Debbie Bookchin, a writer whose work I've read in The Nation and Utne Reader. I missed the first half of her discussion, and didn't get to hear the rest of what she'd said about mesothelioma. I left it on anyway, my mind drifting as I continued to drive home.

She seemed to be promoting a new book, something that had to do with contaminated Polio vaccines and the effects they've had on recipients. My attention snapped back as soon as I started to figure out exactly what she was talking about. I almost rear-ended a car in front of me at a toll booth because I became so engrossed in her discussion.

"Because Salk incubated the vaccine in Monkey Kidneys," I heard her say, "it was widely contaminated with SV40, a cancer-causing monkey virus." This simian virus, SV40, was downplayed by the government, who insisted it was harmless to humans.

But out of nowhere, forty years after we became aware of the vaccine's contamination, certain rare cancers skyrocketed - one of them being mesothelioma. People who worked in banks or as crossing guards where suddenly getting the "coal miner's cancer", and inexplicably dying very young from it. Rare lymphomas, rare brain cancers, and mesothelioma, suddenly all became un-rare in a certain generation of people.

But how many people could have received the contaminated vaccine? I wondered to myself. They became aware of the SV40 contamination pretty early in the vaccine's existence; some people got sick from it right away. So surely they would have stopped using that form. It would have to only be a few. I heard my answer several minutes later: 98 million, all between 1954 and 1963.

It's a number that still isn't sitting quite right with me, a number I still can't quite understand.

There were other ways, once the virus contamination was discovered, to create the vaccine. But we needed a lot, and fast. Those other ways were a bit more complex; they'd take longer to make. Besides, a certain company was contracted to produce the vaccine - and we just couldn't lose all that money. So though people were dying, and though it was suspected by most that SV40 was, in fact, quite harmful (if not immediately, then 40 years later) to humans, the industry shrugged and kept pumping out the monkey-kidney version of the vaccine. We needed to eradicate the Polio virus at all costs, doctors told each other.

Is this what they mean when they say "collateral damage"?

"Well Polio was devastating," my mother recalled to me later on that day when I asked her that same question. During her childhood and my father's, before Salk discovered his vaccine, neighborhood children were contracting it left and right during summers, when the virus seemed to be most prevalent. Many of her little friends, she said, were infected then paralyzed, their limbs withering away, or put into iron lungs just to sustain their lives. Schools closed early for the year, she said. Parents sent their kids to schools with little paper masks, garlic around their necks, or with any other trick they thought would work to keep them healthy, she said. She never learned how to swim because her parents wouldn't let her go near pools or other little kids in the summertime, she said. She and my uncle were kept in the house most of the time anyway, and everyone was afraid.

Naturally, then, at the happy news of this new vaccine, floods of people rushed to be inoculated as fast as possible. It was a miracle, said my mom, and no one would dare not get the vaccine.

My father would have been 18 years old in 1954 when he received the vaccine. They say it takes 40 years for the simian virus to develop into these advanced-stage cancers, the ones where the person is at their sickest before dying. 18+40=58; my father died at 57.

And now, what's coming are those tortuous, obsessive questions, the ones that expose all the fear, vulnerability, frustration and sadness that I try so hard to beat back and push away. Was my father one of those 98 million? Does this explain where the mesothelioma came from? What would have happened if he just went the odd-ball, "risky" route and decided not to go and get the Salk vaccine? What would life be like, what would have happened then? Would he have contracted Polio and died as a teen, thus negating my and my siblings' existence? Or would he have escaped Polio, and still be alive right now, teasing me about my Sting infatuation and taking pride in all me and my brothers have accomplished?

Dangerous questions...I don't want to torment myself forever. I can never know, and I can't even really ask. I did pick up Bookchin's book - The Virus and The Vaccine, which she co-authored with her husband, Jim Schumacher. Maybe it will help, maybe I'm only making everything worse. I sure am dredging the bottom of my emotional barrel, that's for sure. But my renegade-therapist friends keep telling me this is all a good thing.

I'm still waiting to feel that way.

I'm only half way through the book, but I'm frightened as hell. Traces of SV40 are being found in children WHO WERE BORN IN THE 90s - and others who couldn't possibly have received the vaccine during the "contamination" years. Is this genetically handed down? Am I at risk - are my brothers? Is my nephew? Or, has the vaccine been contaminated with the simian virus more recently as well? The entire situation reeks of a government cover-up, and not in that Roswell kind of way. More in that very real, very frightening kind of way. In that very American "who cares? That's forty years from now. This will solve our immediate problem, and we'll figure the rest out later" kind of way.

I'd ask, "Whom do I sue?", but I'm just not like that. I'm trying to shield my mother from all of this, but she just keeps asking questions. Since one of them might be "why him, and not me?" I just don't want to talk about it with her anymore.

We're a lot a like, her and me.

xo,