◆ SpookStack

» THE PENTAGON'S TOXIC oe Fair Article Page 5 of 10 a Ce 3 diagnostic tests for autoimmunity. Jackson says the lab values suggested that a full quarter of his Gulf War patients had autoimmune problems. But if Gulf War syndrome is adjuvant induced autoimmunity, what is the adjuvant? In 1995, Asa got the clue she sought. An official with the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs introduced her to a patient who had volunteered for an N.LH. experimental-herpes-vaccine trial. The patient complained of chronic fatigue, muscle and joint pain, headaches, and photosensitive rashes—the same baseline symptoms as in Gulf War syndrome. She also had arthritis and other autoimmune disorders, diagnosed through Jab tests. But this particular patient had never received the herpes vaccine. She'd been injected with a placebo, a single shot of a compound called MF-59, which contained an adjuvant that is much stronger than alum: squalene. This was in 1991, the same year as Desert Storm. Asa discovered from published scientific papers that squalene was a cutting-edge adjuvant used in at least three experimental vaccines in the 1990s. These were used in tightly controlled experiments on animals and humans, but vaccines containing squalene have never been approved by the FDA for human use. Squalene is a lipid, or fat, that can be found in sebum, an oily substance secreted by the human sebaceous glands. Commercial squalene is extracted from shark livers. You can buy it in health-food stores in capsules which are purported to boost the immune system. It is also used in some cosmetics as a moisturizing oil. Squalene manufacturers say it's safe, and It appears to be when swallowed or rubbed on the skin. But injecting it is another matter. The adverse effects of vaccines containing squalene have been documented in papers published in such peer-reviewed scientific journals as Vaccine and the Annals of Internal Medicine. Since the mid-1970s researchers studying autoimmunity have used squalene to induce rheumatoid arthritis and a multiple-sclerosis-like disease called experimental allergic encephalomyelitis (E.A-E.) in rats. Like every other oil-based adjuvant ever concocted, squalene is apparently unsafe. A theumatologist who conducts research into adjuvants at the N.LH. disputes the idea that adjuvants can induce autoimmune disease in humans. The researcher, who did not wish to be named, calls these allegations "junk science.” He admits that squalene can induce rheumatoid arthritis, but alleges that it does so only in one species of rat. Published scientific studies, however, show that squalene has been linked to the development of autoimmune disease in rats, mice, and macaque monkeys. When asked if he thinks the FDA will ever approve squalene as an adjuvant, the N.LH. researcher says no. “The FDA has not had a track record of approving oil-based adjuvants." Research with squalene has been done at Stockholm's Karolinska Institute, which names the finalists for the Nobel Prize in Medicine each year. Dr. Lars Klareskog, a rheumatologist at the affiliated hospital, concurs that compounds with squalene could be dangerous for humans. "It's true that adjuvants can, in these experimental models, tum a potential autoimmune reaction that is otherwise not pathogenic into pathogenic immune reactions. That is true in experimental animals. Whether that is true in humans, we do not really know. But we believe that is so. Where the event occurs in reality very much depends on the genetic background." In early 1995, Asa submitted to the army Surgeon general the report Dertzbaugh had asked her to write. In response, the Department of Defense in March 1996 published a report on the Internet, refuting her theory without ever putting it to the test. A letter to the commander of the U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command from Dr. Waiter Brandt, who works for the Science Applications International Corporation, a Pentagon contractor, summarized the army's critique of Asa's theory, claiming that the only adjuvant the military used in vaccines was alum. He also criticized Asa's use of the phrase “human adjuvant disease" (H.A.D.), a term used by Japanese doctors in the 1960s to describe autoimmune problems in women who had received silicone injections to enlarge their breasts. Brandt's letter said, "The term was coined 30 years ago and is generally not used by most informed physicians today.... There is similarity between HLA.D. and Gulf War Syndrome in their symptomatology. However, the development of symptoms in H.A.D. requires years, not months.” After the Internet report cane out, Asa's initial frustration with the army's lack of response turned to anger. "Adjuvant disease doesn't take years to create symptoms," Asa says. “And I wrote them about squalene and they hardly mentioned a word about it." Recently, Dr. Brandt explained to Vanity, Fair; "The presence of squalene or squalene antibodies in blood samples would seem to be a natural occurrence and not an indicator of adjuvant injection." According to Dr. Robert Garry, a professor of microbiology at Tulane University School of Medicine who works with Asa, this contradicts the fundamental definition of autoimmunity. "If that were true, we'd have antibodies to all the proteins, all the tissues in our bodies, and the immune system wouldn't function at all,” he says. In August 1997, Vice Admiral Harold M. Koenig, then the surgeon general of the navy, wrote that the army "has used squalene as an adjuvant in several experimental vaccines ... over the past ten years... Military members who served in the Persian Gulf received standard vaccines, licensed by the FDA, with one exception [botulinum toroid, which approximately 8,000 troops received].... Squalene was not a component of any vaccine product given." http://www. idir.net/~krogers/vantyfair-html 11/8/2005