Talk:Squalene

Health Controversy
This section was out of date. On top of that, the references it cited had been updated since the article was last written, so that the article no longer reflected the material in the references, especially in regards to the WHO website. Updated this. Also, removed a bunch of material which inaccurately quoted the WHO website. Would like to add the position of the WHO back, but no time right now - felt it was better to have no information than complete misinformation. corvus.ag (talk) 04:50, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

Tone down the rhetoric
Ackowledge that there is a controversy on the health effects of squalene, but keep the main emphasis on the chemical and biochemical aspects. --tom (talk) 22:49, 2 September 2009 (UTC)

Lack of scientific references
It mentions squalene being implicated in Gulf War syndrome but there are no citations to support this. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Contributions/85.28.112.249 (talk) 12:04, 24 August 2009 (UTC)


 * What ever hasn’t been implicated in Gulf War Syndrome? No, don’t even bother answering – the entire existence of Gulf War Syndrome is so dubious that it isn’t really appropriate to discuss how things may relate to it. — NRen2k5 (TALK), 21:17, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

The claims about Gulf War syndrome have been debunked on several levels, and I have added a WHO citation to support this. Squaline was not administered to Gulf War Veterans, nor does the administration of Squaline significantly increase or decrease the level of Squaline anti-bodies in humans. Squaline anti-bodies are found in nearly 100% of humans as it is produced by the body, and its concentration increases with age. These three separate facts are heavily supported by research and each independently contradicts and discredit the one report suggesting a link.

The claim that nearly all Gulf War Syndrome patients have squaline antibodies is extremely misleading. Numerous studies have shown that squaline antibodies are naturally ocurring in humans, and other studies have exposed the original study as deeply flawed and biased. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Contributions/160.33.43.65 (talk) 22:04, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

My goodness, he can not even spell squalene and then he wants to post about it.


 * Is Squaline as spelled above and Squalene the same thing? Should Squaline spelling be linked to this Wiki page, or should the above comment be taken in context of a repeated misspelling? Quite rightly this subject is controversial (when a foreign material is injected into the human body!) The above spelling of Squalene does not help, or fill a reader with confidence. Wiki discussion pages are as important to me as the main article, due to the oft preponderance of Wiki Fascism on the main page!

I went ahead and erased and rewrote the Controversy section because it was really misleading (quoting part of a study to support your claims when the study actually specifically debunks said claims) and we're hearing more and more about this Squalene stuff being a hidden danger that will kill us all, so I figured we should handle the "gulf war syndrome" connection.--Brad R. (talk) 19:36, 28 September 2009 (UTC)


 * I removed this passive voice sentence:
 * On top of this, it has been determined that the anthrax vaccines given to those US military personnel did not use squalene as an adjuvant.
 * because the link given, at http://www.who.int/vaccine_safety/topics/adjuvants/squalene/questions_and_answers/en/, shows no evidence to support the WHO conviction. Specific links need to be added if there really are studies showing this study was flawed.Cellorando (talk) 13:29, 6 December 2009 (UTC)

ALLERGIC TO SQUALENE!! Are they out their minds?? Why would the human body produce antibodies against squalene when the body naturally produces the substance? The next thing they will be telling us the human body is allergic to water!! The DOD paid a researcher to make Squalene antibodies, a complete waste of taxpayer money. The researcher could not. What he did do however, was to force the mice to make the antibodies using other substances in conjunction with the squalene and then had the nerve to suggest he had made antibodies to squalene. Alice in Wonderland. For DOD study results See page 7 of http://www.fda.gov/ohrms/dockets/dockets/80n0208/80n-0208-c000037-15-01-vol151.pdf 65.255.192.26 (talk) 18:24, 23 February 2016 (UTC) Dr Raymond A. Schep.

Correct stereochemistry
The stereochemistry of one of the alkenes in the 3-D structure of squalene is incorrect. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Phil Strucely (talk • contribs) 00:06, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

here is a reference for the rat model with mycobacteria, i dont know how to insert into text, if someone would like to help? http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18438855?itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum&ordinalpos=5    Heinzmorrison (talk) 07:16, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Deleted URL, "Reported Attack Site!"
When I went to this link, I got a warning message from Google that it was a "Reported Attack Site!"

I have deleted the url link (but not the article citation) from the article page and moved it here. I don't suggest anybody try it unless you're prepared to handle malware.

Here's the link: http://www.avip2001.net/OfficialDocuments_files/Asa_squalene.pdf Antibodies to Squalene in Recipients of Anthrax Vaccine Experimental and Molecular Pathology 73, 19–27, 2002

Here's some of the message:

http://safebrowsing.clients.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?client=Firefox&hl=en-US&site=http://www.avip2001.net/OfficialDocuments_files/Asa_squalene.pdf

What happened when Google visited this site?

Of the 7 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 4 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent. The last time Google visited this site was on 2009-06-29, and the last time suspicious content was found on this site was on 2009-06-29.

Malicious software includes 20 scripting exploit(s).

Malicious software is hosted on 1 domain(s), including gumblar.cn/.

This site was hosted on 1 network(s) including AS29873 (BIZLAND).

--Nbauman (talk) 18:06, 10 July 2009 (UTC)

One sentence in the article reads as follows: "A review of this study by the AFEB found severe shortcomings in the methodology used and found them to contradict the actual claims made[4]." However, we are not told what the abbreviation AFEB means. When using abbreviations in writting, always spell out the full name or phrase the first time the abreviation appears, with the abbreviation following in parenthasis. Example: "American Medical Association (AMA)." Thereafter, you may use the abbreviation alone. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Ex89158 (talk • contribs) 15:47, 27 August 2009 (UTC)

Triterpenes
I was very disappointed to be directed to "terpene" when I selected the link "triterpene". Unfree (talk) 18:38, 8 September 2009 (UTC)


 * The terpene article was a redirect to triterpene. Without checking, I'm guessing that this article originally wikilinked to triterpene and at some point that was changed to wikilink directly to triterpene in order to avoid the redirect. I've boldly replaced the redirect at terpene with a stub and changed the wikilink. Wtmitchell (talk) (earlier Boracay Bill) 23:12, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

Vaccine and Health Controversy
I think this part of the page needs extending, rather than putting external links in support. I came to this page because of things I had seen about the H1N1 vaccine, PURELY to find out what the controversies were. I'm sure the same is true for a lot of people currently researching this compound


 * Not in this article, IMHO. Seemingly the controversy has gone around for some years; possibly it might merit a separate article and a reference to that article from here. However, the links I tried to follow do not certify that there is enough reasonable certified material for an article on the controversy. Besides, the Gulf War Syndrome article does contain a section about a major part of the controversy. I changed the link to that section, in order to make it easier for such readers who mainly come to this page in search for information about the controversy.


 * The WHO link summarizes findings in published and unpublished reports. This summary superficially is contradicting the published but severely criticized report of Asa et al., but also superficially does not coincide with the quotation from the other US Defense source; unhappily, I did not succeed to follow that link. The Asa et al. reports give moderate percentages of people with squalene antibodies; WHO summarizes findings that "most adults" have such antibodies, according to one study "with incidence increasing with age". The reference they give, however lists percentages that I would not call "most", since they are considerably below 50%. (On the other hand, 18 months old mice were found to have rather high antigene incidences.) The report stems from US Defense research institutes, The last source I tried to find according to the quotation has found that practically all humans have such antibodies.


 * There may be other reasons than errors or omissions explaining some of the differences; and there may be a multitude of various reasons for the findings. The investigators were partially looking for different kinds of antibodies, and I think they used different techniques to isolate them. Increasing amounts of antibodies with age - and seemingly higher amounts for women than for men, according to one of the studies - may be caused by some kind of natural process, or be due to environmental encounters with squalene (e.g. in cosmetics). Reported higher amounts among rheumatic individuals may be false signals (due to too small samples and/or to methodological mistakes); or may be statistically valid, but independently caused by common background factors (I suppose that people with such illnesses in average have a higher age, which in itself seems correlated with more squalene antibodies); or there could be a true causal autoimmunological relation. I don't know at all; it is not our task to speculate; what we could do is to summarize peer's reviewed articles (from reasonably well-established and reasonably neutral sources), if and when they appear, and are clear and interesting enough to be the use of an article. JoergenB (talk) 23:08, 9 October 2009 (UTC)


 * I totally disagree. Firstly, I'd just like to point out that you suggest that the topic in question is potentially large enough for it's own page, but somehow not large enough to be included in this article.  I just find that a little contradictive.


 * The controversy is significant, not just because of the gulf war syndrome links, but rather the fact that the compound itself has never been approved by the FDA for use in vaccines. So then you have companies out there like Novartis, who are creating vaccines intending to be distributed to the entire population, using this substance, and not even including the substance in their tests.   So, they're putting this potentially harmful substance in something they want to give everyone, and not test it.  This is a pretty significant controversy considering they did the same thing when they tried to vaccinate for H1N1 back in 1976.  The vaccine they distributed to the population was not the vaccine that was tested, and many people ended up suffering from neurological diseases resulting from their shots.  And then you have the CDC, FDA, and the manufacturers all discussing behind closed doors at these possibilities  32.136.22.18 (talk) 00:00, 10 October 2009 (UTC)


 * I'm not at all inconsistant. I don't want to remove the short present section about the conflict. If a large article will be written, it could be announced in the beginning of the section by means of the template . This is the way we usually handle cases where some interesting item concerning a subject merits a too long treatment to be conveniently put in the main article itself. This template now is employed in over 65000 articles in the English wikipedia. This should be done here, too, if and when a sufficiently well-substantiated longer (encyclopædically interesting) text is written.
 * This article is about a chemical compound. If a controversy about one usage of this compound merits a long treatment, then this should be done in a separate article - with good and transparent linkage.
 * As for your concrete statements: I can't answer; I don't know what is true. This goes for most of us in most subjects. That is a reason for going not for the absolute truth, but for verifyable material. The verification should be by reliable sources. Youtube is not a reliable source. Reports published by research institutes owned by one of the involved parties (and I count USD as an involved party) are inferior sources, compared to reports by non-involved scientists, even if all the reports are peer's reviewed and published in journals which generally are considered as of good academic standard. JoergenB (talk) 14:41, 10 October 2009 (UTC)


 * It has been pointed out that the use of the youtube reference was not credible, I would also like to point that his other source doesn't demonstrate what he is talking about. I have read the article and no where does it talk about "and not even including the substance[squalene] in their tests."


 * There is no controversy, just fearmongering from the usual suspects – conspiracy theorists, alternative medicine fanatics and B-class celebrities with too much time on their hands. — NRen2k5 (TALK), 21:27, 14 December 2009 (UTC)


 * I'm afraid there is still a controversy. Obviously if they do not understand why it supposedly "works" then they cannot speculate what the unintended consequences are.  And why isn't Matsumoto's book Vaccine A discussed (2004)?  There IS very convincing evidence that squalene was used in some lots of the anthrax vaccine, and the FDA confirmed these amounts.  SRI found none because they used an older less sensitive test (no reason given...) The amounts found with more sensitive tests were in amounts typical of a study- 10, 20, 40, 80 ppb.  Those soldiers with all the autoimmune diseases all had squalene antibodies.  Healthy had none.  And there are multiple studies in animals showing the same autoimmune problems with squalene.  The military does not have to disclose what they do and cover up whatever they wish without consequence.  Why would they NOT use squalene experimentally? They needed an adjuvant that was fast acting in 1991 - they did not have enough time to use the approved vaccine.  They tried squalene on 100K soldiers.  Only 2 shots used- the normal course used 6 over 6 months. They had to keep it undercover because they didn't want anyone to know we didn't have a good vaccine (still don't it appears).  It is not clear why they persisted using a weak single protein fragment that needed the adjuvant when earlier tests showed multiple fragment types are much more effective without the adjuvant, and squalene caused various serious problems. The military experiments all the time on soldiers and soldiers can do nothing about it except quit or get court marshalled.  There were some poor attempts to discredit Dr Pam Asa, Dr Robert Garry and Matsumoto but they didn't hold water. In fact one lot of vaccine was causing many pilots to have problems, and they moved the lot to another location, and the problems followed. (This was in 1998 when they were doing mass military vaccinations)

3/5/21  And why is it only added to the flu shot for people over 65? I believe this is also the practice in Europe. Why not everyone? It was in the H1N1 vaccine (experiment?). It must be a powerful adjuvant. And it was later found that if you got the H1N1 vaccine you were more prone to getting the flu. No ref, sorry. Rkcannon (talk) 05:54, 21 September 2010 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.214.160.215 (talk)

People with time should read the following section: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War_syndrome#Anthrax vaccine and update the controversy section of this article. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Contributions/173.177.13.157 (talk) 03:48, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

Heavy POV in section "Use as a food supplement"
This reads like an ad copy and contradicts the discussion about squalene in vaccines and the fact that it naturally occurs in the bloodstream as a cholesterol precursor. In fact, the source article "articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2009/08/04/Squalene-The-Swine-Flu-Vaccines-Dirty-Little-Secret-Exposed.aspx " is largely bunk, linking to articles about disproven links to Gulf War Syndrome and Autism by vaccine. In addition, the following source (http://www.amazon.com/Science-Behind-Squalene-Human-Antioxidant/dp/1890412953) seems much less appropriate than PubMed links.

(opinion) The whole section reads like a supplement proponent trying to validate their own use of squalene while still clinging to the belief that 'squalene == bad' and I think the whole section needs to be purged or rewritten. (/opinion) Contributions/64.201.177.59 (talk) 15:19, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Special note on female humans
Apparently, this compound is found in human vaginal fluids in appreciably higher concentrations than what humans of both sexes use in Vitamin D and cholesterol synthesis. At least, it sounds that way here. The Mysterious El Willstro (talk) 06:20, 27 June 2010 (UTC)

Narcolepsia
Swedish and finnish studies have found a signifikant increase of narcolepsia in children who where vaccinated with pandemrix durind the swineflu. They claim that the squalene is the cause. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.226.64.67 (talk) 06:01, 30 March 2011 (UTC)

Melting point
The value of the melting point is reported as either -75 °C or -5 °C in many sources. The -75 value seems dubiously low in comparison to other long chain hydrocarbons, but it is reported in normally reliable secondary sources including the Merck Index. The precise value of -4.8 to -5.2 °C reported in the 1974 Angewandte Chemie paper seems the most reliable in my opinion, so I have put that one in the chembox. -- Ed (Edgar181) 20:09, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

Biosynthesis
The structures of farnesyl pyrophosphate are missing an O in the pyrophosphate (between the two phosphorus atoms). 69.72.92.71 (talk) 06:32, 22 December 2015 (UTC)
 * I have now corrected the image. Thanks for catching the error and reporting it here.  -- Ed (Edgar181) 13:46, 22 December 2015 (UTC)

Assessment comment
Substituted at 06:46, 30 April 2016 (UTC)

Shark populations impacted by manufacturing squalene
Mercola is claiming that up to a half a million sharks will be killed to make enough squalene to create “satisfy a global supply of squalene-containing vaccines”. He quotes from a New Zealand Herald article which quotes the “California-based group Shark Allies”.

If this is true, I will add a few sentences about how the manufacture of squalene has an impact on shark populations.

I don’t know what percent of the worldwide shock population is impacted?

Is there an alternative to extracting squalene from dead sharks?

https://principia-scientific.com/a-half-million-sharks-to-be-killed-for-covid-19-vaccine/ Phersh (talk) 02:22, 10 October 2020 (UTC)