How Far Back Does HIV go?

[Chimark]

Recently I read in a book (published in 2002) that the case of HIV, the young black male in St Louis in the late 60s and the Englishman in the mid 50s were later proved to be false.

When I search the internet, I still see many references to them…

I realize that what comes up on the first six pages of Google bears little relevance on its accuracy.

Anyhow, what is the “Straight Dope” on these cases. And what is the first “Reliable” case of HIV that we know of for certain.

Thanks

[Kent_Clark]

I don’t have it with me, but I’d refer you to Randy Shilts’ groundbreaking book “And the Band Played On.” He traces AIDS to outbreaks of an unidentified virus carried by blood or sexual content in Africa in the early and mid-1970s.

[askeptic]

The River is a great book it traces HIV to early Polio vaccines in the congo. here is the link: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0316372617/104-4769796-3083128?v=glance

[Exapno_Mapcase]

From Amazon:

His thesis, that HIV made the jump from simians to humans via the administration of oral polio vaccine in Africa in the 1950s, is still controversial, but his arguments are powerful, broad, and undeniable–all that is lacking is conclusive proof.

From New Scientist:

Face the facts
19:00 25 April 2001

Joanna Marchant
The AIDS pandemic was not caused by polio vaccines tested in Africa in the 1950s, say several teams of researchers. Their work should settle the issue once and for all.

In 1999, writer Edward Hooper put forward this controversial theory in his book The River. He claimed that tissue from chimpanzees was used to prepare the CHAT vaccine given to around a million people in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo.

According to Hooper some batches of the vaccine became contaminated with SIV, the chimp version of HIV, allowing the virus to jump to humans. However, the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, which made the vaccine, insists only macaques were used.

Now two teams, led by Simon Wain- Hobson of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, and Neil Berry of Britain’s National Institute for Biological Standards and Control (NIBSC) in Hertfordshire, have analysed old stocks of the vaccine. They found no trace of HIV, SIV or chimp DNA. But they did find macaque DNA, confirming that the vaccine was prepared in macaque cells. “If chimp sequences were present, we would have picked them up,” says Berry.

Missing batch
Hooper dismissed similar results presented at a meeting of the Royal Society in London last year, saying that the key batches of the vaccine no longer exist.

But Berry’s team managed to find a vial of vaccine 10A-11 at the NIBSC that originally came from the Wistar Institute in 1958. Hooper specifically implicated batch 10A-11, so the finding that this too was free from SIV is a significant blow to his theory.

Another team, led by Edward Holmes of Oxford University, has created the fullest evolutionary tree so far for HIV by comparing the DNA of 197 strains from the Congo. The tree suggests that the virus jumped from chimps to humans just once, years before the vaccination campaign started. “We’ve removed one more piece of evidence from the theory,” says Holmes.