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Leading immunologists at International Congress on Autoimmunity link aluminum in vaccines to a new post-vaccine syndrome

While "anti-vaxxers" are being smeared in public campaigns as backward and unscientific fear-mongers, a growing body of cutting edge research is emerging from the top echelons of medical immunology to confirm what the cranks have been saying for years about the devastating effects of vaccine ingredients. The biggest names in the field of study of the human immune system are attached to current papers in the most prestigious immunology literature that link widely used vaccine ingredients such as aluminum to terrifying modern epidemics of immune-mediated diseases including autism and Alzheimer's. As well, they've identified an entirely new post-vaccine syndrome: Autoimmune Inflammatory Syndrome Induced by Adjuvants (ASIA). And while the study of ASIA is shining light on the underlying mechanisms through which vaccine ingredients trigger disease, it is also exposing cracks in the foundation of a century of vaccine orthodoxy .

Nearly 3,000 doctors and scientists from around the world gathered last week at the 9th International Congress on Autoimmunity (ICA) in the Nice Acropolis Convention Center on the French Riviera. Dozens of seminars and panel discussions of causes and treatments for scores of autoimmune diseases were scheduled. But an entire day of the four day event held every two years was devoted to the 3rd International Vaccine Symposium held under the umbrella of the ICA.

Ignasi Rodriguez-Pinto, an autoimmunologist at the Barcelona Hospital Clinic and former fellow of the pre-eminent Zabludowicz Center for Autoimmune Diseases at Tel Aviv University's Sheba Medical Center was at the symposium to announce the creation of a world registry for ASIA.

ASIA was first identified in the Journal of Autoimmunology in 2011 by Dr. Yehuda Schoenfeld, founder of the Zabludowicz Center. It includes a broad spectrum of neurological and immune-mediated phenomena seen following vaccine injections which result from exposure to their ingredients, including aluminum. Among ASIA's diagnostic criteria: weakness, anxiety, rashes, chronic fatigue, sleep disorders and the onset of a range of autoimmune diseases from Systemic Lupus Erythematosis to Rheumatoid Arthritis -- sometimes years after an initial reaction.

ASIA is also dubbed "Schoenfeld's Syndrome" for Schoenfeld who has published more than 1,700 articles in the medical literature and is widely regarded as the world's leading authority on autoimmunity -- disease that results when certain proteins in the body lose their "immune privilege" or protected status, and the machinery of the human defence system mistakes them as foreign invaders and launches an assault on its own body.

"ASIA is a wide concept that includes any environmental factor which is demonstrated to trigger autoimmune conditions," said Rodriguez-Pinto. Cases of Gulf War Syndrome, which result from exposure to the chemical squalene – a component of vaccines used on military personnel during the Gulf War, and siliconosis – immune-mediated symptoms triggered by silicon exposure in prostheses and breast implants – are now being considered under ASIA's umbrella, he said.

The registry was established in January of this year as a tool to enable researchers to analyze cases of ASIA globally, to compare clinical manifestations after exposure, and to establish common instigators of autoimmunity and compare efficacy of treatments. In its first month of operation, 283 confirmed cases of the syndrome were registered -- 73% followed vaccination while the remainder were exposed to other known toxins.

Picture above: Adult sheep affected by ASIA: extreme catchexia, poor wool coat, redness of skin, atrophy of muscular masses and generalized weakness, followed by death

Most currently registered cases of ASIA have followed vaccination for Hepatitis B (70.7 percent), said Rodriguz- Pinto. Forty percent of the cases developed defined autoimmune conditions including Multiple Sclerosis and a subgroup of 20 percent had more than one diagnosed autoimmune disease.

"Adjuvants have been used for decades to improve the immune response to vaccines, and among this large group, alumimum and silicone are most commonly described," explains a paper in the July 2013 Immunologic Research, penned by four leading immunologists including Schoenfeld. "Nonetheless, as supported by increasing reports, although rarely vaccines are able to trigger the development of [autoimmune diseases] ADs in genetically susceptible humans, this could be ascribed to the presence of containing adjuvants. The time relationship between the vaccine delivery and overt disease can last from a few weeks to even years."

The paper adds that a "now abundant literature shows that exposure of human and animals to aluminum from various sources can have deleterious consequences on the nervous system, especially in adults."

Among the authors of that abundant literature is Canada's Christopher Shaw, chairman of the Children's Medical Safety Research Institute and a researcher at the University of British Columbia who , at the IAC last week described aluminum as "insidiously unsafe."

"That the aluminum ion is very toxic is well known," said Shaw. "Its toxicity was recognized as long ago as 1911 and evidence of that has only been amplified since," he said, especially in a growing body of evidence of aluminum's role in Alzheimer's disease and autism.

Though found in some food and water sources, since the 1920s, aluminum has been used in many and a growing number of vaccines, Shaw said, and "the compartment in which you put it in and the route of administration makes all the difference."

"Aluminum is a demonstrated neurotoxin," he added. "From the molecular level between ions and molecules, to the genome, to the protein and cellular level to the circuit level, there is no level of the nervous system that aluminum does not negatively impact."

Shaw reported on his research on mice injected with aluminum doses equivalent to those in vaccine injections. They showed progressive loss of muscle strength and endurance, and at the cellular level, "profound loss of motor neurons."

He and other researchers also demonstrated "social interaction deficits" and elevated anxiety levels among the vaccinated mice, reflected by their obsessive stair climbing and reluctance to move between light and dark regions compared to controls, for example. Shaw's forthcoming research demonstrates the impact of aluminum on gene proteins and gene expression and how these relate to autism.

MIT senior research scientist Stephanie Seneff presented a roundup of studies outlining the effect of aluminum on the pineal gland and its possible explanation for the high prevalence of sleep disorders among ASIA sufferers.

French researcher Romain Gherardi explained his team's 2013 study describing a severe meningoencephalitis in mice after vaccination and tracing the path of nanoparticlized aluminum in doses equivalent to what a human would receive. The team found deposits of aluminum encapsulated in macrophages – large immune cells that engulf foreign particles -- in lymph nodes, spleen and brain tissue just four days after injection and lasting up to one year after a single shot. "Aluminum particles used in vaccines are biopersistant and neuromigratory," he concluded. "These properties have been previously underestimated," and he said, they could explain "neurobiological adverse events."

Another Canadian researcher, Lucija Tomljenovic, described the mechanisms she believes were operating in the deaths of two girls: a 19-year-old who died in her sleep six months following HPV vaccination, and a 14-year-old girl who died in her bathtub 15 days after a second HPV shot. Tomljenovic stained tissue samples from each of the girls' brains and found evidence that aluminum was acting as a "Trojan Horse" into the brain, carrying along with it vaccine components which induced a "cross-reactive" autoimmune attack causing cerebral hemorrhage.

Though not a human study, perhaps Spanish veterinary researcher Lluis Lujan's experiment with sheep exposed to aluminium-containing vaccines is even more significant. Lujan outlined the "devastating consequences" of a compulsory multiple vaccine campaign against bluetongue in Spain in 2008 in which masses of animals died -- now recognized as the ovine version of ASIA.

His 2013 study to investigate the underlying causes of the epidemic found that only 0.5% of sheep inoculated with aluminum vaccines showed an acute reaction within the first two to six days, marked by an array of nervous signs including lethargy, transient blindness, stupor, prostration and seizures.

However, as following the lethal bluetongue vaccines, the delayed onset "chronic" phase of the disease varied widely, manifesting in 50-70% of flocks and sometimes affecting nearly 100% of animals within a given flock. The reaction was frequently triggered by exposure to cold and began with abnormal behaviour, restlessness and compulsive wool-biting, then progressed to acute redness of the skin, generalized weakness, weight loss and muscle tremors, and finally, entered the terminal phase where the animals went down on their front quarters and could not get up. They became unresponsive, comatose and eventually died. Post-mortem examinations revealed "severe neuron necrosis" and aluminum in the nerve tissue.

"We are supposed to balance the benefits of vaccines against the adverse events," said Lujan. "What is sold is [the message] that vaccines have only beneficial effects, and the rest is forgotten or ignored, or nobody wants to hear about it."

Certainly there are many people who don't want to hear about the latest research linking vaccines to incurable and debilitating diseases. The enormity of the implications of ASIA and the toxicity of the aluminum adjuvant in current use throughout the world seems not yet to have penetrated medical consciousness.

Public health policy was barely mentioned, though it was noted that new and more vaccines are continuing to be added to pediatric schedules without taking account of the toxic load of aluminum. And just what is a tolerable dose of a neurotoxin in a healthy newborn's vaccine?

There is an unaddressed issue of a staggering lack of informed consent. How many parents, for example, considering the distant risk of a hepatitis-B infection in their healthy newborn infant, versus the risk of their child developing perhaps multiple irreversible and poorly understood neuroimmunological diseases, would choose the shot?

"First do no harm," expressed an apparently frustrated scientist linked to the US FDA. "When we know something is a toxin, it should not be given to people, particularly healthy people. We have heard enough evidence today that it is a toxin. We can debate it, but based on my experience it is not even a good adjuvant."

No one even mentioned challenging pharmaceutical giants and demanding aluminum's retraction from vaccine manufacture, though such scientists at the ICA are perhaps the best candidates to do so.

ASIA victims are still in a system that is wholly ignorant of the adjuvant problem. Their symptoms, even if they occur immediately in the wake of vaccination, are unrecognized by physicians who have been steeped in a century of vaccine dogma. They are shuttled from one specialist to another and frequently wind up treated by psychiatrists.

Sarah Jensen, a board member of the Vaccination Forum of Denmark intends to send the ASIA registry details of about 200 cases from Denmark, collected from families of girls, mostly aged 14 to 25, who have experienced severe health complications following injection with the Gardasil vaccine against cervical cancer. But Jensen supposes that most of Gardasil's victims -- like those who say vaccine damage is a myth – have never heard of the syndrome.

While many doctors and researchers at the IAC see the problem as simply one of replacing aluminum with something "safer," there are more fundamental questions provoked by the study of ASIA. Aluminum's toxicity was previously underestimated and denied for nearly a century, so what of other ingredients like the viral DNA contaminants (discussed at the congress), and the infectious agents themselves? What if the whole vaccine model is just the hubris of a failing one-drug-one-effect paradigm that has vastly underestimated the spectacular complexity of the human immune system?

Most of Lujan's sheep showed no acute phase of immediate post-vaccine trauma. How long is this latency in humans? Lujan's sheep suffered from an apparent dose-dependent aluminum toxicity. What if even a single aluminum injection sets the immune system up for a fall into neurological or immunological disease that is triggered years, perhaps decades, later? In that case, ASIA is the tip of a very big iceberg.