New reports debunk AIDS/Polio vaccine link.

[Triskadecamus]

In some past debates here, we have heard the common news story that Polio Vaccines used in Africa were responsible for the AIDS epidemic. The theory was fairly common, although little known until the publication of “The River” by a Dr. Hooper. The evidence presented in this book was widely accepted as proof of the connection by main stream media, despite much controversy among scientists involved in HIV research over the quality of evidence, and the level of implication that evidence provided.

Hooper’s book, “The River” presumes that chimpanzee epithelial cell cultures were used in the production of Oral Polio Vaccine (OPV) used in trials in what was the Belgian Congo in 1958. He supposes that all the main group HIV-1 variants descend from this source of infection.

The Wistar Institute scientists who developed the vaccine report that no Chimpanzee tissue was used. They have offered and provided culture material from the original project for analysis, twice. The results of that analysis (conducted independently by members of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology) were published today (April 26, 2001) in both Science, and Nature.

If chimpanzee cells were indeed used, this would lend support to the OPV/AIDS hypothesis, since chimpanzees harbor a simian immunodeficiency virus, widely accepted to be the origin of HIV-1. We analyzed several early OPV pools and found no evidence for the presence of chimpanzee DNA; by contrast, monkey DNA is present.

Regarding Hooper’s claim for the descent from this common ancestor of the entire group one HIV infection pandemic other studies (from several research sources working together with HIV genetic data) said:

. . . we estimated the date of the last common ancestor of the main group of HIV-1 to be 1931 (1915-41).

which is not less than seventeen years before the OPV trials.

The sensational claims always get press, the hard science of correcting those claims gets less attention.

Tris

[Liberal]

I guess that’s just the nature of the thing, Tris. There is a common lust for the sensational. People don’t like to be bored.

But what I wonder about is why Hooper didn’t simply have those same tests done himself. Did he attempt to get culture material from Wistar? Finally, how exactly was the material obtained from them? Is it possible that Wistar offered up very selective material that they knew to be “clean”? I’m not defending Hooper, but I just hate to think that 10 years of research spanning 4,000 written pages of notes plus 600 interviews produced nothing of any value, while a couple of samples provided by “the culprit” just wash everything away.

Can you expound on your thinking a bit?

[Triskadecamus]

I suppose it is possible that the Wistar scientists falsified their samples after the fact. I know of no allegations that they have done so, or proof of such an accusation. Wistar did not do the tests, neither the most recent ones, nor the ones done several years ago.

When Edward Hooper published his book he was challenged by Wistar scientists on his sources for the information that Chimpanzee cells were used, and he made no public response. Wistar offered to allow any independent investigative entity examine its records, and samples, and did so, twice. Both investigations supported the assertion by Wistar that it used no Chimpanzee tissue, and included no trace of HIV, or SIV viruses in its vaccines. It is not possible to know with absolute certainty that no one lied. The evidence available supports Wistar far more than it supports Hooper.

Other criticisms of “The River” have also been made, including its epidemiological dependence on an evolutionary chain of inheritance in HIV-1 then though questionable. That logical chain has also been found to be incompatible with the scenario as our record of the genome of HIV, and SIV viruses has increased. Chimpanzees are a known host to the SIV virus believed to be the precursor of HIV. Monkeys do not.

Chimpanzees are indigenous to the region where early HIV outbreaks are thought to have occurred, and were used as food animals, and butchered in market places in the central Congo earlier in the century. A primary zoonotic event in the Congo is not dependent upon intravenous technique, and the potential number of opportunities for such an event is not unreasonably small.

The demographics of OPV use, and HIV-1 outbreaks don’t match at all well. The times are wrong by several decades in places where the physical locations do match, and the genetic diversity of the strains does not parallel what would be expected in an artificial vector like immunization.

The epidemiological history of AIDS is still very difficult to pin down, since it may well have existed without being identified for many years, even many decades in small reservoirs of infected humans who passed it on only to very small numbers of close associates. It took the pressures of wars, and modern transportation, and dramatic changes in human sexual practices to bring the disease out of those original small reservoirs, where IV drug use, and wide spread prostitution provided entrance vectors into the general populace. Indeed, HIV has several non-endemic variants that seem to have been in the world population for a hundred years or more.

Use Condoms. Don’t self inject. Don’t save needles. Viruses don’t make moral judgments.