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| Volume 47, Number 1, Spring 1999 |
by Bob Kuska
Last January 20, the Journal of the National Cancer Institute published a review on the cellular and molecular biology of simian virus 40 and its implications for human health. According to Janet Butel, PhD, lead author of the review and a virologist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, her paper, like so many scientific articles, went unreported in the press.
But not for long. Butel said she arrived at her office one morning about four weeks later and was swept without warning into a roiling, two-day media frenzy. "The phones were going crazy, and there were messages from all of the media for interviews," she said. "I had no idea what was going on."
What was going on, a reporter later told her, was that a story from London had reached the United States and touted Butel's "new findings" linking the original polio vaccines, known for decades to have been contaminated with SV40, to an emerging worldwide cancer epidemic. Butel said she was stunned. She had presented no unreported data in her review, nor are scientists even close to showing that the Salk and Sabin polio vaccines administered in the early 1960s have triggered a cancer epidemic.
But for a few days, many in the American press ran with this almost 40-year-old story as a shocking new revelation of an emerging cancer epidemic. In the wake of this short-lived hysteria, halted when Butel held a press conference the following day to clarify her position, many were left wondering how the story got started in the first place.
The answer is a lot of misunderstanding.
The saga begins in rural France and the home of Robert Matthews, science correspondent for the Sunday Telegraph in London. According to Matthews, he noticed Butel's review while clicking through the Journal's Web page in search of story ideas. "I regularly trawl these [journal Web sites] looking for promising stories," said Matthews. "It allows me to cover breaking science stories despite living in the middle of rural France."
On February 10, three weeks after Butel's article was published, Matthews fired off an e-mail to Butel asking several questions ranging from the administration of the original vaccines to the prevalence of SV40 in people. Butel said she responded the same day, and that was the last she heard from Matthews.
Back in France, Matthews said he thought he had clicked onto a good story. "The fact that Butel's paper had not been reported, that it contained the latest in-formation, was published in a major refereed journal, and would be of considerable interest to our readers left me with no doubt about using her paper as the basis of a story on SV40 and polio vaccines," said Matthews.
But, was there really anything new to report on SV40 and polio vaccines?
Not according to a press release issued by Baylor College of Medicine at the time of publication. The press release, a window into how Butel and her colleagues view the significance of their work, touted the review for presenting evidence that SV40 is present and spreading in the human population and could be associated with cancer, possibly as a viral cofactor. The Baylor release makes no mention of SV40 directly causing cancer, nor does it refer to new data linking the original polio vaccines to cancer.
In fact, Butel said she tried in her return e-mail to steer clear of the scientifically complex issue of SV40-tainted polio vaccines introducing the virus into people. Matthews asked, "Is it possible that we're seeing the steady spread of SV40 to non-vaccinated humans by those vaccinated pre-1962." Butel replied, "I should point out there is no proof that SV40 was introduced into the human population by the contaminated polio vaccines. But it is a possibility."
Matthews also asked whether Butel thought it was a matter of urgency to investigate the link between the contaminated polio vaccines and the spread of SV40 in the human population? Butel answered in part, "ÉPersonally, I do not think the major issue is whether the original human infections came from the use of polio vaccines or not. The fact is the virus now infects humans, and we need to understand those infections."
Four days later, the Sunday Telegraph ran Matthews's story on page 7 under the editor's headline, "Pre-1963 Polio Vaccines May Be Killing Hundreds Through Cancer." The first four paragraphs read:
The mass vaccination campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s may be causing hundreds of deaths a year because of a cancer-causing virus that contaminated the first polio vaccine, according to scientists.
Known as SV40, the virus came from dead monkeys whose kidney cells were used to culture the first Salk vaccines.
Doctors estimate that the virus was injected into tens of millions during mass vaccination campaigns before being detected and screened out in 1963. Those born between 1941 and 1961 are thought to be most at risk of having been infected.
Now a new study [Butel's review] of the effects of SV40 points to disturbing evidence that the monkey virus causes a number of human cancers. It concludes that there is "compelling" evidence linking SV40 to mesothelioma, a once-rare type of lung cancer whose prevalence is rapidly increasing.
(Note: The review actually stated, "More samples need to be analyzed before the strength of association of SV40 with any particular tumor type is known, although the number of mesotheliomas analyzed is accumulating and the consistent association of SV40 with that tumor is compelling." [italics added] Again, the field is far from unanimous on this point, and mesotheliomas are strongly associated with asbestos exposure.)
This might have been the end of story, but the parent Daily Telegraph operates a syndicated newswire. After Matthews's story appeared, editors included it among the dozen or so that the newswire sends daily to its paid subscribers around the world.
That's how David Jones, the foreign editor at the Washington Times, a daily newspaper in Washington, DC, circulation approximately 70,000, first saw the story. Jones said the story immediately caught his attention. "I'm of that generation that got the polio shots, and I expected a lot of people like myself--assuming the story to be true--would be interested to know that they may be at some risk from those polio shots," said Jones, who has 20 years of experience as an editor, first with the United Press International, and now the Washington Times. However, Jones said he has no experience in health or science reporting.
On February 17--the newspaper's health editor having never seen the story--the Washington Times ran Matthews's piece verbatim on the front-page. The headline read, "Polio Shots in '50s, '60s Are Linked to Cancer; Tainted Vaccine Given to Millions." Within hours, reporters in Washington and New York got busy dialing their telephones to get the scoop on this tainted polio vaccine story in the Washington Times.
In Houston, the telephones started ringing in Butel's office.
Across the Baylor campus, the phones also were ringing in the medical college's public affairs office, the same office that had issued the press release on Butel's review three weeks earlier. B.J. Almond, a communications specialist, racked his brain to figure out how an old press release bearing the headline, "More Research Needed On Monkey Virus Found In Humans," could have caused such a stir.
"When it was the national networks calling we knew that something was up," he said. "Everyone was referring to the headline in the Sunday Telegraph article. That was the spark that set off the wildfire."
Included in the frenzy was the first wave of calls from concerned parents. Almond said many wanted to know whether they were putting their children at risk by having them vaccinated for polio, an idea that was far afield from anything mentioned in Butel's review. Several of the callers also wondered whether they had or were likely to develop cancers caused by their vaccinations.
Almond said he could sense that the story was careening way out of control. On February 18, one day after the calls had begun, he scheduled a press conference to allow Butel to set the record straight. The college's last press conference was for a Baylor doctor who performed surgery on Russian President Boris Yeltsin.
Butel, a laboratory scientist with no media training, found herself that afternoon standing before a bank of cameras and microphones from many of the major American television networks. What had started as a review of the cellular and molecular biology of SV40 had now entered the realm of public health as Butel stated that the current polio vaccine was safe, and parents should have their children vaccinated.
Butel later told the Associated Press of the original Sunday Telegraph story, "It is going one step farther than I am prepared to go. I don't think that the evidence is definitive that [the virus] causes those tumors."
By the end of the week, reporters had stopped calling Butel's office.
Butel said she still receives e-mails and letters from concerned parents and people with cancer who saw her name in the press. With a laboratory to run, Butel said it is a real juggling act to know how to handle them.
"I understand that this is a story that has a lot of public interest because people fear cancer, and there are a lot of people around who got the contaminated vaccine," she said. "So, I think it is important that reporters convey this type of story accurately. I don't know how you control for that."
Neither do a lot of veteran health reporters. Many say that with the current proliferation of health publications, stiff competition to break stories, and an ability to post breaking news immediately on the World Wide Web, they constantly find themselves chasing down non-stories that have taken on lives of their own. In a perverse twist, it is the news that makes the story, not the story that makes the news.
"Things pop up on the wires or newspapers that an editor who has no working knowledge of the field will see, and your first reaction when you read the headline is, 'Oh my God,'" said Joe Palca, who covers health and science for National Public Radio in Washington, DC.
Palca, who two years ago filed a seven-minute piece on the tainted Salk and Sabin polio vaccines for NPR, said he read the Journal review after Matthews's article reached the United States and convinced his editors to back off of the story. "I decided the ball hadn't advanced that much," said Palca.
"I mean, the people who believe that there is a link think there is a link, and I'm reasonably certain that the people who don't still don't. I just didn't feel that the review article changed that."
Other media outlets did not back off for fear of getting beaten by their competition. "When a story takes on a life of its own, the wires run it and there is a lot of exposure paid to it," said Roger Sergel, senior editorial producer for the ABC News Medical Unit. "We have to report it, and then maybe knock it down. That's what happened with the SV40 story."
Sergel said ABC has established a network of roughly 80 cancer experts with different areas of expertise to help it evaluate the newsworthiness of breaking medical findings. He said routinely contacting these experts has helped to institute a level of quality control at the network.
But for Almond, the Information Age raises another even broader issue of quality control. "The question is which article are people still reading?" he said. "If they're still seeing the Sunday Telegraph on a Web site without realizing there is an updated round of stories mentioning that the information had not been presented accurately, they may still be responding to that initial article. The information is out there--right or wrong."
Matthews, meanwhile, said he stands behind his story.
Bob Kuska is a science writer at the National Cancer Institute. Reprinted with permission from the April 21, 1999, issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.