- SYDNEY (AFP) - Australian
authorities moved Saturday to reassure people vaccinated against polio
in the 1950s and 1960s after a report that a contaminated vaccine linked
to cancer was issued at that time.
-
- Australian Chief Medical Officer, Professor John Horvath,
said there was no evidence of an increased cancer risk to those exposed
to the vaccine, produced between 1956 and 1962.
-
- The Age newspaper said it had uncovered evidence that
almost three million doses of the Salk polio vaccine made then were contaminated
by a monkey virus linked to a range of cancers.
-
- Commonwealth Serum Laboratories, then a government agency,
released at least four batches of the vaccine knowing they were contaminated
with the virus, called Simian Virus 40 or SV40, the paper said.
-
- Internal research conducted by the laboratories in 1962,
but never made public, reportedly showed the monkey virus was a potential
cause of cancer in humans.
-
- Scientists linked the virus, which came from pulped infected
monkey kidneys used to produce cell cultures to grow the polio virus, to
a range of rare human lung, brain and blood cancers.
-
- The paper said the laboratories produced more than 18
million doses of the vaccine, enough to vaccinate six million Australians,
between 1956 and 1962.
-
- By 1965, 90 percent of Australian children aged between
five and 14 had been injected with the vaccine.
-
- The Commonwealth Serum Laboratories was privatised in
1994.
-
- Horvath said however that there had been no link between
the vaccine and an increased risk of cancer.
-
- "This issue was reviewed at an international workshop
on SV40 in the USA in January 1997," he said in a statement.
-
- "The meeting concluded that there is no evidence
of increased cancer risk in people who were given vaccine containing SV40.
-
- "Much research had been undertaken overseas since
that time. In 1997 and again in 2001 Australian health authorities reviewed
the most up-to-date literature and came to the same conclusion," he
said.
|
