The Garden of Fertility or The Virus and the Vaccine

The Garden of Fertility: A Guide to Understanding Your Fertility Cycles to Take Control of Your Reproductive Health

Author: Katie Singer

The Garden of Fertility is a guide to using fertility awareness-that is, reading fertility signals in order to prevent or achieve pregnancy. Certified fertility educator Katie Singer explains how to observe and chart fertility cycles to determine when a woman is most fertile to increase chances of conception, or to exercise birth control naturally-a method that, when followed precisely, is as effective as the Pill. Unlike other books on fertility awareness, The Garden of Fertility also describes how to use the charts to gauge gynecological health and offers nonmedical options for strengthening reproductive wellness. This book provides all the information women never learned in sex education class, but should have.

Author Biography: Katie Singer is a certified fertility educator.

New interesting textbook: The Craving Cure or Or Perish in the Attempt

The Virus and the Vaccine

Author: Debbie Bookchin

Jonas Salk's polio vaccine is regarded as a veritbale medical miracle, for it largely eradicated one of the most feared diseases of the 20th century. But the story of the vaccine has a dark side, one that has never been fully told before. Between 1954 and 1963, close to 98 million Americans received polio vaccinations contaminated with a carcinogenic monkey virus, now known as SV40. The government downplayed the incident, and it was generally accepted that although oncogenic to lab animals, SV40 was harmless to humans. But now SV40 is showing up in human cancers, and prominent researchers are demanding a serious public health response to this forgotten polio vaccine contaminant. A gripping medical detective story, The Virus and the Vaccine raises major questions about vaccine policy.

Publishers Weekly

Journalists Bookchin and Schumacher argue that for nine years, from 1954 to 1963, almost every dose of polio vaccine produced in the world-and the 98 million Americans who received polio vaccinations-was contaminated with a cancer-causing virus from the monkey kidneys used to develop the vaccine. Although the polio vaccine developed by Dr. Jonas Salk virtually ended polio as a threatening disease, the authors detail how "the screening techniques and observation periods that Salk and the vaccine manufacturers employed were not capable of always catching the contaminants." This sordid story spells out how repeated research studies showing that the "SV40" virus was in the vaccine were dismissed by federal health officials, so that "there would be no warning to consumers that the vaccine they and their children were receiving contained a live monkey virus whose effect on humans was entirely unknown." In the second part, the authors contend that even today such organizations as the National Institutes of Health continue to dismiss study results, even though numerous studies have shown that SV40 is capable of causing cancer in humans. The final and most horrific part of the story reports that Lederle Laboratories, the sole oral vaccine supplier in the U.S. from 1977 onward, continued to use monkey kidneys possibly infected by the SV40 virus in its manufacturing process until oral polio vaccine was removed from the market as late as January 2000. This meticulously researched, levelheaded and well-written book should stir up considerable debate. Because the authors never become alarmist, this solid work of investigative reporting carries considerable weight, and deserves to be read by a large audience. Agent, David Black. (Apr.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Table of Contents:

	Introduction	XI
1.	The Paralyzed President	1
2.	A Nation at War with Polio	10
3.	A Young Man from Pittsburgh	19
4.	The Vaccine that Opened Pandora's Box	31
5.	Triumph and Disaster	46
6.	Does Anyone Know What's in This Vaccine?	57
7.	The Virus Discovered	69
8.	"We Were Scared of SV40"	86
9.	"The Worst Thing in the World"	99
10.	Why Not a Safer Vaccine?	118
11.	Everyone Knows SV40 Doesn't Cause Cancer	132
12.	"A Wild-Assed Idea"	146
13.	Don't Inflame the Public	161
14.	A Call to Turn Aside the Dogma	175
15.	On the Scientific Map	187
16.	The Perfect War Machine	203
17.	A Study Marred by Strife	218
18.	Wasted Time, Wasted Money	229
19.	No Funding, No Research	245
20.	Alexander's Tumor	259
	Conclusion	278
	Notes and Sources	287
Appendix A	Association of SV40 with Human Disease	333
Appendix B	Correspondence between Bernice Eddy, Joseph Smadel, and Roderick Murray (chapters 6 and 7)	343
Appendix C	Documents and Articles Concerning the Discovery of SV40 in Salk's and Sabin's Vaccines (chapters 8 and 9)	347
Appendix D	Memos and Correspondence Relating to Multi-Laboratory Study and Carbone-Pass Rapid Access to Intervention Development (RAID) Grant (chapters 17 and 18)	353
	Acknowledgments	365
	Index	369