A Very High Potentiation?

Potentiation /po·ten·ti·a·tion/ (po-ten″she-a´shun)
Enhancement of one agent by another so that the combined effect is greater than the sum of the effects of each one alone.

We know so little about how the Immune System actually works. Well, no, I’ll give that greater context. We know a vast amount about a whole range of bodily physiological functionality in and around its reactioning to antigenic exposure. We have named this range of astoundingly complicated interactions “The Immune System” and consider this the description of a homeostatic mechanism whereby our bodies withstand infiltration of a range of potentially destructive micro-organisms and the outcomes of ill-health which can accompany them.

An active battle ground is portrayed whereupon we walk under potentially constant attack from such malevolent creatures. This starts at birth and then infancy, together with ones childhood years, are regarded as a kind of open season for ambush by infectious diseases. Meningitis, measles, whooping cough, chicken pox, mumps, scarlet fever, polio, smallpox, tuberculosis, German measles, Spanish flu, diphtheria, tetanus. Now there’s a scary list! All these can attack at any time and many can be fatal, is the message – because these bugs are designed to create havoc and so lead to your demise. They don’t care – you’re just another host on which they can multiply and make merry.

All the love and care in the World could often not save someone who’d fallen ill from such infection in days of yore. A Bronte sister, living in a cold, damp, dank Yorkshire village on the edge of bleak moorland and subsisting on a meagre, nutrient deprived diet was primed to fall ill and then hard to save. So it was for so many in the earlier stages of our industrial development and thus Jenner’s vaccination scheme fell upon open ears as a method to cheat the fates and prevent such suffering. The following hundred years saw living conditions fall for most people and childhood deaths from this range of infectious disease rise alarmingly. But, at the same time, the squalor of the industrialisation rush was being overcome, housing improving, sewers laid, clean water supplies piped in and food supplies brought to market from the surrounding countryside. Into the twentieth century, as these improvements bedded in and constantly improved, death rates from the infections fell dramatically. Some, such as Scarlet Fever, just stopped being an issue at all.

But vaccination then started to take a grip and, as we all have seen, in recent years it is provided for so many infections that simply need management to bring about complete recovery concomitant with a strong lifelong “immune memory” of the incident, whereby bodily reaction to encountering the infection again is immediately met with a strong, pre-primed response and no symptoms of disease even arise. Nonetheless it has become standard practice now to aim to install this “immune memory” artificially, through “vaccination” into the blood system of items – “antigens” derived from the infective organism – up to and including the whole organism, in attenuated or killed-so-inactive form. This priming with antigens is the same unproven artifice it was when Jenner came up with the concept stolen from peasant lore into the gory, charlatan practice he eventually sold to the government of the day but it does now have greater refinement.

Along with the carriers, the attenuators and a range of facilitator chemicals (“adjuvants”) to render the antigens available to the cells of the recipient’s immunorecognition committee, there are now considerably fewer of said antigenic reagents in the jabs. “the maximum number of vaccine antigens that a child would be exposed to by 2 years of age in 2013 is 315, compared with several thousand in the late 1990s.”

This was in an article describing a Centre for Disease Control, CDC (USA),  answer to critics linking vaccination load to autism. Surprise, surprise they found no connection but, on closer analysis, the study was actually of a relationship between the number of antigens received and the development of autistic physiological outcomes in the child.

Notwithstanding the obscene and blindingly obviously rapid increase in the numbers of autistic kids, they were able to write that there has been no relationship between the increased number of vaccinations received and these increases in the number of autistic cases. To quote them again: “autism spectrum disorder is not associated with immunological stimulation from vaccines during the first 2 years of life.”
(http://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/Concerns/Autism/antigens.html)

Now there’s a few items to pick up here:

1 – The number of jabs as opposed to number of antigens and the concentration of the individual antigenic substance in the jab.

2 – And, of course, the quantity of carrier chemicals still received, jab upon jab.

3 – Potentiation

4 – And the nature of the vaccination response of the recipient

3 and 4 run together, of course and they were the real reason that I began this piece. I will return to them shortly.

The above CDC Press Release is referring to the paper published in the Journal of Pediatrics, entitled “Increasing Exposure to Antibody-Stimulating Proteins and Polysaccharides in Vaccines Is Not Associated with Risk of Autism” by Frank DeStefano et al. ( http://jpeds.com/webfiles/images/journals/ympd/JPEDSDeStefano.pdf)

The study looks at kids born between 1993 and 1998 and in “managed care” from birth and  compares those who had developed ASD with those that had not. Of all those studied they noted  “none of the case study children had an ASD diagnosis by the age of 7 months and few had a diagnosis by age 2 years.” As ASD is a regressive disorder, typically with staged onset – as so well described in the Guardian by Charlotte Moore! –  we know its onset is noticed more commonly towards the end of infancy, maybe 2 to 4 years, often later still.

So DeStefano’s paper describes how they measured in their  two groups how many separate antigen types (NOT quantity) were injected into each kid and shows no significant difference in the number of antigens received between ASD outcomes and “normal” outcomes. They did so much statistical connivance, too, ignoring – “excluding” –  2000 of their 2700 controls and still finding regression amongst this group. Speech and other behavioural loss in their second years of life – and these were regarded as “normal controls”.

Anyway, the infamous Offit had come up with the idea that assessment of  vaccines should “take into account all the antibody-stimulating proteins and polysaccharides in each vaccine”.

(Offit, PA et al – “Addressing parents’ concerns: do multiple vaccines overwhelm or weaken the infant’s immune system?”Pediatrics 2002;109:124-9)

Offit being the one, of course,  who blithely declared that infants could readily receive thousands of antigens at any one time in proposing multiple vaccines, whilst at the same time the pharmaceutical industry had been striving to reduce to single figures the number of antigenic components in any one vaccine – very quietly but over the last twenty years or so. They knew that the gross simplicity of the established, Jenner style methodology could no longer stand any reasonable scrutiny – whilst, of course,  continuing to sell the products and declare their safety.

So, whereas the DeStefano study clearly shows simply and only that a lot of kids develop autism today but more don’t – which I think we knew – it draws attention to the nature of the modern vaccine challenge – which he was not in fact investigating at all.

My father was a research immunologist who’s major interest was the passage of peptides through membrane barriers – the gut wall and the blood-brain barrier being the chief focus. The realisation that whole peptide fragments, if not whole proteins, could pass through the intestinal wall and into the blood stream was contra to the established view that gut enzymes digested proteins completely down to amino acids which could then pass into the blood stream and be used in general physiology. He fed radioactive labeled proteins and recovered from blood samples peptide sequences antigenically identifiable as intact from the original proteins. (Hemmings, WA, Editor, “Antigen Absorbtion by the Gut”, MTP press, 1978.

The book is distilled proceedings of two international conferences held at the University of Bangor.) It’s frontspiece starts:

“Since the turn of the 20th century there has been good evidence in the literature that immunologically significant amounts of native protein of the diet could pass across the gut wall in animals and man. Thus, oral immunisation is common to immunologists. That it happens does not appear, in all these decades, to have greatly affected received physiological thought of the process of digestion.”

Wow.

The intestine is one of the major centres of immune functionality, holding constant dialogue between the body and ingested materials together with the resident gut bacteriological and other flora and recent arrivals! The need is to filter out invasive organisms but not preclude ingestion of food. This is the most important location for the function of “border control” – stopping those alien species from gaining access to the internal body fluids and structures.

The lungs have similar challenges and systems of observation and control as does the skin to a lesser extent (it not being a point of absorption in general practice.)

Right – so there’s remarkably little ingress of organisms into the blood system but proteins and their component peptides do get through. Pray tell me, then, why Offit’s antigens, be they blunderbuss full of many components or purified sharp shooters with single antigen type, have any benefit whatsoever. It could well be said that they are merely adding a very small component to the recipient’s normal diet – a few extra peptides!

But of course there’s more to it than that. The sophisticated accompanying chemical cocktails somehow hoodwink the vaccine recipient’s physiology into dedicating blood cell lines to particular, long term guardian function, with the ability to provide these particular antibodies when required. Somehow, also, there’s high possibility of collateral outcomes, including auto-immunity, allergy and pulmonary malfunction (asthma etc). Well these ARE powerful concoctions. [I return to this topic in my next post to explore it in greater depth: https://bmeandothersciences.wordpress.com/2013/04/09/offits-antigens-and-the-myths-of-mass-exposure/ ]

At the time of inoculation all recipients are in unique physiological states – weight, age since birth, diet and nutritional status (eg blood sugar, vitamin C), sleep,  psychological status (calm or worried, for example) and so on.  Additionally, of course, each has his or her own unique previous history of natural immunological interactions in the course of their lives.  The case study matching for the CDC/DeStefano analysis has none of this detail, save age. However each jab given is the same dose, irrespective of the recipient. Obviously each child will react accordingly and differently each time.

Thus a spread of reactions is to be expected but repeating the process over time will tend to bring forward accumulation of damaging outcomes. Thus if damaged once the probability of a subsequent jab causing further damage is increased – a kind of positive feedback system.

Damage such as “potentiation” – hyper-sensitivity to reaction to immune challenge in this instance. Anaphylaxis type reaction, for example, can follow such an event. I feel the current vaccination methodologies are, if anything, increasing the likelihood of such responses because natural antigenic filtration and disposal by physiological and structural mechanisms are bypassed  and  the blood borne immune response is more likely  supersaturated with far higher doses of certain unique antigenic fragments than it previously ever met.

Perhaps the increased sophistication of the new generation of vaccines actually carries an even greater risk than before