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Quest For The Origin Of AIDS
William Carlsen, Chronicle staff writer
Sunday, January 14, 2001
©2001 San Francisco Chronicle
(First of a two-part series)
He had marked the Central African villages that were home to some of the earliest known cases of AIDS. In a striking number of cases, those villages were near the rural clinics where a U.S. company had tested one of the world's first oral polio vaccines in the late 1950s.
For nearly 10 years, the former BBC reporter had been investigating the possibility that something had gone terribly wrong during the vaccination campaign -- that a monkey virus had contaminated the experimental polio vaccine and ignited the global AIDS epidemic.
It was a theory so troubling -- and some say so riddled with flaws -- that for years respected science journals refused to even acknowledge it. But when Hooper's book "The River" was published in late 1999, laying out evidence for the hypothesis in meticulous detail, the international scientific community could no longer ignore it.
Last fall, the Royal Society of London, the prestigious scientific academy once presided over by Sir Isaac Newton, called the first-ever conference on the origin of the AIDS epidemic, primarily to address the theory advanced by Hooper, a non-scientist who had majored in American literature in college.
The two-day conference drew some of the most prominent medical researchers in the world. By the time the historic showdown concluded, other rival and conflicting theories would emerge -- including one involving the widespread use of contaminated needles -- and Hooper would not be the only one to ask the chilling question:
Did modern medicine inadvertently cause one of the greatest scourges of the 20th century?
The answer will have significance for generations to come. More than 57 million people have been stricken with AIDS, 22 million have died, and 15,000 new infections are occurring daily. And experts now fear there are other lethal viruses out there in the "hot zone."
If AIDS did sweep the globe because of human error, perhaps the next, more devastating epidemic can be prevented.
The Epidemic Emerges
Los Angeles, 1981
In the spring of 1981, two doctors in Los Angeles reported to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta that they had discovered a rare kind of pneumonia caused by the bacteria, Pneumocystis carinii, in five recent patients. All five were gay men. Two of them had unexpectedly died.
More stricken patients followed. Doctors in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York soon observed that something was destroying the immune systems of their gay patients. And the number of cases quickly began to rise.
That summer researchers at the National Cancer Institute in Maryland used a new, state-of-the-art medical device called the Fluorescent Activated Cell Sorter to test the blood of 15 apparently healthy gay men from the Washington, D.C., area. The results were disturbing -- half the men had such severe abnormalities in their immune systems that the lab technicians thought the machine had malfunctioned.
As the cases accumulated and hundreds of patients continued to die, researchers were dumbfounded. They had no idea what they were dealing with. Was it a new venereal disease? Did it only affect gays? Where had it come from? And what could they do to treat their patients?
The only thing they knew for certain was that more would die before they had any answers.
The Virus
Bethesda, Maryland, 1984
In the early years of the AIDS epidemic, theories attempting to explain the origin of the disease ranged from the comic to the bizarre: a deadly germ escaped from a secret CIA laboratory; God sent the plague down to punish homosexuals and drug addicts; it came from outer space, riding on the tail of a comet.
Then in 1984, researchers in Paris, San Francisco and at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, isolated the elusive human immunodeficiency virus, HIV, that was causing AIDS.
Researchers soon learned that unlike quick-acting pathogens that cause smallpox, malaria or the flu, HIV can lie in wait for a decade or more before overtaking its victim's immune system and displaying its first symptoms.
For public health officials and epidemiologists, the isolation of the virus was a major breakthrough, leading to tests for the presence of HIV antibodies in a patient's blood.
Armed with the new tests, researchers began to track the movement of the slow-acting disease. By the first week of April 1984, more than 4,000 AIDS cases had been recorded in the United States. And new case reports were coming in from around the world -- 33 countries so far.
A Second Virus
University of California, Davis, 1985
Monkeys were mysteriously dying, too.
For the past decade, Asian monkeys in research centers across the United States had been dying from outbreaks of opportunistic infections, and Preston Marx, a virologist at UC Davis, and other primate researchers were baffled.
Then when the first AIDS cases in humans were reported, Marx and others began to suspect that the monkeys were dying from a similar disease.
In 1985, researchers outside Boston isolated the virus that had been destroying the Asian monkeys' immune systems. It bore intriguing genetic similarities to HIV, so they called it SIV -- simian immunodeficiency virus.
The primatologists finally traced the source of the virus to a species of medium-sized monkeys called sooty mangabeys for the ash-gray color of their coats. The mangabeys, which came from Africa, were often caged with the Asian monkeys.
The odd thing was that the mangabeys never got sick, even though they carried the virus and apparently gave it to the Asian monkeys. Was it possible, Marx wondered, that the mangabeys had built up an immunity to the virus over thousands of years of exposure in the African rain forests? And if SIV could have originated in Africa, was it possible HIV had come from there, too?
Marx got out his monkey book and looked up the sooty mangabeys. They came from a narrow coastal range in West Africa.
The Man From Leopoldville
Seattle, 1985
Soon after the first cases of AIDS were reported, medical researchers began casting back in time to try to find earlier AIDS cases, trying to calculate when and where the virus first infected humans.
Some of the earliest cases occurred in Haiti. One case involved a French geologist who had a blood transfusion in Port-au-Prince in 1978 and died of AIDS four years later. In another, the virus claimed the life of a former Canadian nun who worked among Haitian prostitutes and reportedly had a single sexual encounter some time before 1977.
But the trail soon led to Africa.
In 1985 researchers retested blood samples taken nine years earlier by a team of experts from the CDC that had rushed to Central Africa to contain an outbreak of a frightening new virus called Ebola. Five of the blood samples taken from local villagers tested positive for HIV.
That same year, researchers tested even earlier blood samples from the Congo. The blood had been collected by two doctors, an American and a Belgian, who had been investigating genetic differences in ethnic groups in Central Africa. The specimens had been flown back to Seattle for testing at the University of Washington and then stored for decades in the laboratory's freezers.
In the 1985 retesting, Emory and Harvard University scientists used four different procedures on the samples and found one that was positive for HIV. The specimen, which came to be known as ZR59, had been taken from an unidentified African male from the area near Leopoldville (present-day Kinshasa) in 1959.
The sample would become famous as the earliest biological evidence of HIV in humans and a benchmark for all future researchers.
The Face Of "Slim"
Lake Victoria, Uganda, 1986
In August 1986, Edward Hooper set off from Kampala, Uganda, to investigate an outbreak of a new disease that was striking down villagers along the swampy western shore of Lake Victoria.
Born in London's East End, Hooper had lived on and off in East Africa for nearly five years. As a backpacking university student, he became entranced with the region, and he later worked as a teacher, storekeeper and relief agency worker to stay on.
In the mid-1980s, he had returned to the region as a journalist and a part-time correspondent for the BBC. In Kampala, he heard talk that hundreds of people near the Tanzania border were sick and dying, and that medical experts believed they were suffering from AIDS.
Hooper had heard of gays, drug users and hemophiliacs stricken with the disease -- but never entire communities -- so he traveled to the lakeside hamlet of Kasensero to investigate.
One of the elders called a meeting under a tall tree so the villagers could tell Hooper about the illness that arrived four years earlier and had so far claimed nearly 100 lives.
There were coughs and fevers, sores and diarrhea, they said. But the final symptom was loss of weight, leaving its victims gaunt and shrunken. They called the new illness "slim."
When Hooper asked how they caught the illness, some said it came from witchcraft or was brought by Tanzanian soldiers who had come through the area seven years earlier. One villager heard on the radio about a similar disease in America and said the disease had been brought to Africa by whites.
Hooper filed several reports that were published around the world. And that hot August day began the journey that would culminate 13 years later with the publication of "The River."
"I still look back on that day with a mixture of sadness and horror," wrote Hooper, describing the scene in his book.
It would be many years before Hooper would understand the significance of the location of his Kasensero visit, but the theory that would come to dominate his life was just about to emerge.
A Contaminated Vaccine
New York City, 1987
Louis Pascal was tuned to radio station WABC in New York City when an interview with a doctor from San Antonio caught his attention.
For more than a year, Pascal had been working on a theory about the transmissability of HIV. Now, in May 1987, he listened intently as the doctor, Eva Lee Snead, described how monkey kidney tissue used to grow polio vaccines had been infected with a simian virus called SV40.
Snead theorized that SV40 was an ancestor of HIV and that the AIDS epidemic was caused by a mass immunization campaign with the contaminated vaccines.
Pascal, a reclusive figure whose published work consisted of a single essay in a philosophy anthology, decided to research the theory in a local library.
He found that Snead was at least half-right. In the late -1950s, SV40, at the time an undetected simian virus, had contaminated several polio vaccines, though there was little evidence the contamination had caused medical problems. But Pascal found no evidence that the monkey virus was genetically related to HIV.
His research did, however, turn up a remarkable coincidence. The sites in Central Africa where an experimental oral polio vaccine had been administered between 1957 and 1960 were also ground zero for one of the greatest concentrations of AIDS cases in the world.
For months, Pascal pored over scientific journal articles and other documents, until he became convinced that there was a link between the vaccination sites and the earliest AIDS cases. And in November 1987, he drafted an article carefully laying out his theory.
For the next five years, he tried to publish that article and others. He sent the articles to biologists, AIDS researchers and scientific publications including Nature, Lancet, and the New Scientist.
But all he got in return were rejections or silence.
The Species Barrier
Liberia, 1987
Across the Atlantic, Marx, the UC Davis virologist, drove slowly along the main roads of Liberia, a small nation on the west coast of Africa, searching for sooty mangabeys.
Liberia and neighboring Sierra Leone formed the natural range of the mangabeys, and Marx soon observed that hunters often killed the adult mangabeys in the forest, then brought them to market to be butchered for food. They also brought home orphaned infant mangabeys and kept them for pets.
Near the northern town of Zorzor, Marx stopped and snapped a photo of a 10-year-old girl holding a mangabey in her arms. Later he photographed a villager's pet mangabey named "Joe" sitting tamely on the back seat of his jeep.
During a number of trips over the next four years, Marx would collect blood samples from pet and wild mangabeys, as well as from villagers living in the northern and eastern parts of Sierra Leone.
When he returned to the United States, Marx found that some of the mangabey blood samples tested positive for SIV. And the blood samples from a few of the villagers contained both HIV and mangabey SIV genes.
Had the simian immunodeficiency virus jumped the species barrier from the mangabeys to villagers? Marx wondered. Could the virus have crossed over through a bite or blood splashed into a hunter's open cut when the monkeys were butchered for food?
And if the SIV had crossed the species barrier to African hunters and their families, Marx realized, it would have been going on for centuries.
The Wistar Vaccine
West Sussex, England, June 1992
Hooper leafed through a copy of the March 12 issue of Rolling Stone magazine until he found what he was looking for.
A freelance writer from Texas named Tom Curtis had written an article outlining a theory about the origin of the AIDS epidemic -- essentially the same hypothesis Pascal had described five years earlier. Curtis wrote about an oral polio vaccine that had been developed by Hilary Koprowski at the Wistar Institute in Philadephia. During the 1950s, Koprowski, a Polish emigre to the United States, and two other prominent scientists -- Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin -- had been fierce competitors in the race to find a vaccine that would wipe out polio.
Curtis wrote that the experimental vaccine that Koprowski developed had been given to 300,000 people in the BelgiumBelgian Congo between 1957 and 1960 -- the same area where the earliest known cases of AIDS have been found. And, according to Curtis, the kidney cells that Wister used to grow batches of vaccine might have come from monkeys infected with SIV.
Hooper was fascinated. During the past two years he had conducted 200 interviews while investigating 15 different AIDS origin theories, but he had heard only a brief, passing mention of the contaminated vaccine hypothesis.
Now he had a full explanation of the theory and it seemed far more plausible -- and unnerving -- than any hypothesis he had come across.
Hooper read every word of the article. When he finished, he took a long walk to calm down. Then he went home and read the article again.
The Manchester Sailor
New York, October 1992
Koprowski was furious.
The article in Rolling Stone had drawn widespread attention, particularly after a major wire service picked up the story and sent it around the world.
As far as Koprowski was concerned, the article threatened to destroy his life's work. He fired off a letter to Science magazine, vehemently dismissing the theory as "the wildest of lay speculation." Then he sued Curtis and Rolling Stone for defamation.
Meanwhile, the Wistar Institute assembled a panel of experts to investigate the central allegations in the Rolling Stone theory. Six months later, in October 1992, the panel held a press conference in New York to deliver an eight-page report on their findings.
The six experts concluded that the chance that any SIV survived the vaccine tissue culture process "cannot be discounted" but any concentration of SIV particles would have been "extremely low."
Furthermore, the panel noted, oral transmission of SIV/HIV is "extremely rare," and the genetic age of HIV suggested that the virus had existed in humans many years before the vaccination campaign in the late 1950s.
But "the most telling evidence," the six-member panel concluded, "was the case of the Manchester sailor."
The sailor was a British printer named David Carr, who had served in the Royal Navy in the 1950s. In 1958 he was stricken with a mysterious illness and died a year later, suffering from a number of characteristic AIDS symptoms.
His puzzled doctors preserved 50 tissue samples in small paraffin blocks. When some of the specimens were examined in 1990, cells stored in the wax tested positive for HIV, making Carr the earliest known case of AIDS, apparently contracting the disease at least several years before the 1959 Leopoldville case.
The Wistar experts noted that Carr had completed his naval service and returned to England by early 1957 before the Wistar vaccination campaign had begun. "Therefore," the panel said, "it can be said with almost complete certainty that the large polio vaccine trial begun late in 1957 in Congo was not the origin of AIDS."
The report seemed to exonerate Koprowski. But the panel recommended that monkey tissue no longer be used in the manufacture of vaccines because of the risk of contamination from "other monkey viruses which have not yet been discovered."
It suggested that independent tests be run on a remaining sample of the Wistar vaccine stock that may have been used in Africa to see whether it contained any SIV.
Later, Rolling Stone settled Koproski's lawsuit by publishing a clarification saying it never intended to suggest there was "scientific proof" the vaccine caused AIDS.
A New Ally
Oxford, England, September 1993
Despite the findings of the Wistar panel, Hooper pressed ahead with his research, conducting further interviews and poring over all the records and eyewitness accounts he could find on the Wistar vaccine trials in Central Africa.
When he heard that a celebrated scientist, William Hamilton, was also intrigued by the polio vaccine theory, Hooper went to visit the professor at his cottage in a village near Oxford. It was a meeting that years later bore fateful consequences.
In 1992 and 1993, Hamilton had won three of science's most prestigious prizes for his work in evolutionary biology -- the Wander Prize from the University of Bern, the Kyoto Prize from the Inamori Foundation and the Crafoord Prize from the Swedish Academy of Sciences. He was fascinated by the evolutionary aspect of the AIDS virus, particularly the fact that its apparent natural host, African primates, appeared to be immune.
The two men discussed the various theories about the origin of the epidemic, and Hamilton encouraged Hooper to continue investigating the vaccine theory despite the findings of the Wistar panel.
Hamilton was not impressed by the panel's report. Shortly after Hooper's visit, he wrote letters to Nature and Science, calling the report scientifically weak and preliminary.
What disturbed him the most, Hamilton wrote, was the scientific community's reaction against the theory, particularly the earlier refusal of periodicals like Science and Nature to publish articles and letters by Pascal and others concerning the controversial hypothesis.
In his letters, Hamilton said he was not yet convinced of the vaccine theory, but he warned that the scientific community's failure to give it serious consideration before similar public health campaigns are launched in the future could result in "hundreds of millions of deaths."
Hamilton wrote that he was especially troubled by Koprowski's decision to sue Curtis and Rolling Stone. He compared it to the burning of heretics and the Vatican's 1633 heresy trial of Galileo, calling it an attempt to shut down valid and important scientific discussion.
"Are we starting all over again with a Medical Establishment now in the robes of the universal Roman Church?" he asked.
But Hamilton's concerns were ignored. Both journals declined to publish his letters.
Marx's Question
New York, 1995
For Marx, it just didn't add up.
He had left UC Davis and was now conducting research for the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center. In his office at the primate center in upstate New York, he grappled with a simple but critical question: If Africans had been hunting and butchering monkeys for hundreds if not thousands of years, routinely exposing themselves to simian viruses, why hadn't an AIDS epidemic erupted earlier?
He was not convinced that the polio vaccine theory was the answer. For one thing, SIV transmitted orally to humans is many times less likely to survive than SIV transferred from monkey blood directly into a human cut.
And evidence now showed that there were actually two AIDS epidemics caused by two distinct viruses -- HIV-1 and HIV-2 -- that had apparently crossed from different species of monkeys in two regions of Africa that were a thousand miles apart.
Genetic testing by Marx and others showed that HIV-1 appeared to be related to chimpanzees, while HIV-2 was linked to the sooty mangabeys.
Therefore, if the HIV-1 epidemic had been caused by the Wistar vaccine contaminated with a virus linked to chimpanzees from Central Africa, the vaccine could not have caused the HIV-2 epidemic in northern West Africa, where the virus came from sooty mangabeys.
So what caused the two epidemics to suddenly erupt at the same time in the middle of the 20th century, Marx wondered.
The prevailing theory in the scientific community attributed the epidemics to the social upheaval in Africa during the independence struggles of the 1950s and 1960s and the urbanization that followed.
Under that hypothesis, the epidemic emerged as roads were cut through the rain forests and strict colonial travel prohibitions were lifted. This enabled HIV carriers, who had been infected by monkeys and had previously lived in isolated rural communities, to crowd into cities, where they spread the virus through less restrictive sexual practices.
As proof, the theory's advocates pointed to the soaring prevalence of AIDS among African soldiers and prostitutes in cities and along the truck routes criss-crossing Africa.
But Marx was skeptical. Africans had experienced mass displacement and social upheaval before, particularly during centuries of slave trade. By the time slavery was finally abolished in the 1800s, more than 30 million Africans had been uprooted from their tribal homelands. And most of them came from the very areas of Africa where the epidemic would later emerge.
If the virus had been regularly infecting African hunters, even in isolated cases, it likely would have spread to the United States, just as another virus that caused leukemia was spread to America through the slave trade.
Marx's research suggested that something else was at work.
In Sierra Leone he had collected 9,000 human blood samples of which only seven tested positive for HIV. At the same time, more than half the adults in a troop of wild sooty mangabeys he tested were positive for SIV.
It was clear the simian virus only rarely made the jump to humans. And even when the virus did cross the species barrier, Marx found that the people it infected did not become very ill. The virus appeared to cause a "dead-end" infection, so weak that it could not be transmitted sexually to other people.
Yet something had caused this relatively harmless simian virus to turn into HIV, triggering one of the deadliest pandemics in human history. And Marx thought he might have the answer.
New Life
England, 1995
On the morning of March 24, 1995, Hooper picked up a copy of the Independent and on the front page of the London newspaper was the headline: "World's First AIDS Case Was False."
Hooper was stunned.
One of the members of the Wistar panel -- acclaimed AIDS researcher Dr. David Ho -- had insisted on conducting new tests on the tissue samples from the Manchester sailor.
The new tests found that British seaman David Carr had not died of AIDS, after all. Instead, his tissue samples had apparently been contaminated during earlier laboratory testing with HIV from another patient who died around 1990.
The news meant that the single most compelling piece of evidence undermining the hypothesis that Wistar's polio vaccine had caused the AIDS epidemic had now been eliminated.
The debate about the origin of AIDS was about to heat up.
Tomorrow: Historic showdown at the Royal Society of London.
©2001 San Francisco Chronicle
I heard about the HIV/polio-vaccine theory a number of years ago. I believed it immediately and still believe it. It will never be acknowledged as the truth, however, because it is politically incorrect to besmirch the reputation of Jonas Salk, though I personally don't see how it was his fault. We just didn't have the knowledge of viruses in his day that we do today. He set about solving a scientific problem, and he succeeded. End of story.
In a spree of "gay-on-gay" violence not seen since Nazi Germany, one homosexual man, Gaetan Dugas, was directly responsible for killing over a thousand homosexual men by deliberately infecting them with the AIDS virus. Indirectly he may be responsible for tens of thousands, eventually perhaps hundreds of thousands of AIDS deaths. One of the first known AIDS carriers, Dugas was known as "Patient Zero" because he caused so many of the earliest infections (Clowes:97). Even after his diagnosis Dugas "justified his continued sodomy with the excuse that he was free to do what he wanted with his own body. Even when he was in the final stages of AIDS he would have anonymous sex with men in homosexual bathhouses, and then show his sexual partners his purple Kaposi’s Sarcoma blotches, saying, ‘Gay cancer. Maybe you’ll get it’" ("The Columbus of AIDS." National Review, November 6, 1987:19).
Wasn't Dugas a Canadian flight attendant who contracted the disease during a trip to Africa?
I'm looking forward to tomorrow's continuation of this story. For additional reading about some really big human killer diseases, get a copy of Andrew Nikoforuk's "The Fourth Horseman." (You probably have it in your library, but in case you don't...)
This article does not, as written, reference any fault to Jonas Salk, but to Hilary Kaprowski who was in "fierce competition" with Salk and Sabin.
This article does not, as written, reference any fault to Jonas Salk, but to Hilary Kaprowski who was in "fierce competition" with Salk and Sabin.
That may be, but say the phrase "polio vaccine" and who will 99.9% of the public immediately think of?
Ref your post #3
I have mentioned this before on other threads but maybe worth repeating. The "ground zero gay" is a red herring, in my humble opinion. Remember the good old days when Castro cleaned out his prisons and mental hospitals and allowed them to come to the USA? Remember that a great many of these were homosexual? Was Castro performing a humanitarian act (yea, right!) or was he dumping a bunch of health problems on us because they were dropping like flys from some (at that time) unknown illness. AIDS started to spread very rapidly right after this country was flooded with Cuban "refugees."
Were not Castro's troops in Africa helping establish communism there? Chances are pretty good they could have picked up the virus and brought it home with them. Also, remember before PC took over that another high risk group was Hatians - who enjoyed open commerce with Cuba. In fact, it used to be a sick joke that when guys came down with aids they would try to convince their parents they were Hatians.
All of the above is just my humble opinion, but maybe worth considering.
Perhaps we should finish the job our ancestors started and exterminate all the monkeys and primates left on Earth. That way, there will be no more virus hopping from our near-relatives. Besides, one should never leave an enemy standing after you've beaten them and we seem to have left the monkeys and primates around.
Wasn't Dugas a Canadian flight attendant who contracted the disease during a trip to Africa?
He was a flight attendant. Don't know if he went to Africa or if Africa came to him. Doubt if the truth will ever be known to the populace due to the HOMOSEXUALS & their Advocates.
In Defense of the Need for Honest Dialogue by Benjamin Kaufman, M.D.
Six years ago, NARTH was founded by myself, Charles Socarides and Joe Nicolosi.
On a Fourth of July weekend about ten years ago... when my wife Veronica and I came upon the scene of a horrible accident. I began to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to one of the victims. His nose had been completely torn off, and my mouth came into direct contact with the blood pouring from his face. I had to continue for some 45 minutes....
The man died in the emergency room, and I asked the physician in charge--an old acquaintance of mine--to obtain an HIV status on him. He refused, based on his fear of legal reprisal, because it was against the law to obtain an HIV test without written consent. The victim was dead and such a consent obviously wasn't available.
Enraged, I called another friend who ran the blood bank in Sacramento and still runs it today, and who was very familiar with the HIV epidemic. He backed up the emergency room doctor, saying he had been right not to give me that information. He advised me to obtain an HIV test on myself to see if I had contracted the virus.
This policy is a deadly one: it prevents the gathering of data necessary to track the penetration of the virus into the general population. I had seen two very well-respected physicians--whom I had known all my professional life--cowed by a political atmosphere designed to protect the confidentiality of the infected, but at the expense of the uninfected.
Old news to the Blood Trail here on FR. Check out BLOOD TRAIL: Heart of Darkness Revisited
This was indeed interesting. Please be sure to post part 2 of the series tomorrow -- I'll be looking for it.
Were not Castro's troops in Africa helping establish communism there?
Prisons and mental hospitals are known "breeding grounds" for homosexual behavior.
AIDS started to spread very rapidly right after this country was flooded with Cuban "refugees."
Also, the southern extreme of Florida had a concentration of homosexuals just before this release.
Below is an Amazon.com reviewer's comment on Edward Hooper's book. There are some fairly good arguments here. I think there is room for skepticism.
Reviewer: A reader from an HIV/AIDS lab in the US
In contrast to Ed Hooper's accusation that the scientific community has shoved the hypothesis that AIDS came from contaminated oral poliovaccines (OPV) administered in the Belgian Congo in the 1950s, a recent forum was organized by no less than the Royal Society in London to address central points in this hypothesis. What emerges from this discussion is that this hypothesis is unlikely, based on counterproofs from different angles and disciplines:
1. There was no evidence that chimpanzee kidneys were used for preparation of the vaccine. 'Eyewitness proof' put forward by Hooper is subjective and can easily be dismissed as interview bias. Having invested so much time in preparing this book, it is easy to suspect that Hooper has a vested interest in protecting this hypothesis. In any case, several lots of these vaccines were tested to be NEGATIVE for SIV contamination, and were shown to be made from monkey, not chimpanzee, cells.
2. The ecological association purported in this book, suggesting that early AIDS cases came from sites where vaccinations were done, is misleading. One village turned out to be misspelled. Moreover, these areas are alongside major routes of trade, and hence could facilitate the spread of the early epidemic. The epidemiologic correlations cannot be verified statistically due to the lack of a control population, and the very low number of cases. The cohort presented by Hooper is weak to conclude any epidemiologic causality.
3. Chimpanzees used for testing the vaccine came from an area where the schweinfurthii subspecies abound. HIV-1 Group M, N and O are most closely related to SIV from the troglodytes subspecies, found in west-central Africa. The earliest case of HIV-1 documented in 1959 was in Kinshasa, which is close to the troglodytes range via operative ferry routes from Brazzaville. To date, Kinshasa has the highest diversity of HIV-1 Group M viruses ever documented, with all the subtypes present (except B), suggesting that it is the site of the early epidemic.
4. Phylogenetic analyses using supercomputers extrapolate that HIV-1 Group M began to diversify around the 1930s. A key element here is the 1959 sample which Hooper ironically helped identify. Sequences from this sample branch before the split of subtypes B, D and F, suggesting that the ancestor of all the subtypes (10 in all) was present far before 1959. The diversity of HIV-1 isolates in Kinshasa also reveal a less subtype structure, suggesting that the diversification occurred there, and that evolution from a single common ancestor, rather than multiple introductions of the different strains, have occurred.
5. Reconstruction of the method for poliovaccine preparation (washing, trypnization and freeze/thawing) using infected kidneys from SIV-infected macaques revealed that the infectivity of viruses is reduced 10^13 (e.g., 10-trillion)-fold. Hence, no virus could have survived the vaccine manufacturing process.
Combining all these arguments, the chain-of-evidence presented in this book is severely weakened. Overall, Hooper has presented a spectacular hypothesis fit for a media frenzy. Unfortunately, this may affect efforts to control polio eradication in the globe. Based on the presented evidence, this hypothesis NEEDS to be put to rest. Much work has to be done. The origin of AIDS remains to be solved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Perhaps we should finish the job our ancestors started and exterminate all the monkeys and primates left on Earth.
Hey wait a minute! I am a primate!
Part 2 has just been published today.
The origin of AIDS remains to be solved...
My wife recently completed her BS in Biotechnology, from UC Davis. This program specializes in cellular biology, metabolism and genetic engineering- and study to a far greater degree than MDs. Her hobby, though it sounds bizarre, is the study of the AIDS virus.
Her conclusion, when I asked her directly, is that the virus could not have occurred naturally- it was man-made.
Since I'm not involved in that field, and know very little about cellular biology, genetics, etc., I cannot substantiate this further...
But, her perspective is clear: it is impossible for the virus to jump species, as has been believed thus far. There are too many differences, too many adaptations that have to occur, before the possibility can exist. Therefore, it had to have been "helped" along, by someone...
FWIW,
Is your wife familiar with Edward Hooper's work? If so, does she think his theories are plausible?
...it is impossible for the virus to jump species...
Then how can the human virus be made to infect chimps?
My reading of the literature inclines me toward Alissa's skeptical view. After all, meat-eating villagers in tropical Africa do a lot more 'experimenting' with monkey viruses than we do - and FAR more than we did in the 1950's.
The establishment lies, but not always.
"In a spree of "gay-on-gay" violence not seen since Nazi Germany, one homosexual man, Gaetan Dugas..."...rather than one man, IMO the worst gay-on-gay violence was perpetrated by the majority of the homosexual community itself which, when the true nature and potential of AIDs was just becoming understood, refused to cooperate with essential public health measures such as closing gay bathhouses in San Francisco and assisting in epidemiological tracking, defiantly proclaiming that such activities would interfere with their "rights" to follow the lifestyles they wished to pursue (see "And the Band Played On", by Randy Shils).
I dunno about AIDS but SV40 is scary business...especially for people my age (49) who had both Salk and Sabin polio innoculations.
--Boris
"Perhaps we should finish the job our ancestors started and exterminate all the monkeys and primates left on Earth. That way, there will be no more virus hopping from our near-relatives. Besides, one should never leave an enemy standing after you've beaten them and we seem to have left the monkeys and primates around."
I think you've watched "Planet of the Apes" one too many times.
But, her perspective is clear: it is impossible for the virus to jump species, as has been believed thus far. There are too many differences, too many adaptations that have to occur, before the possibility can exist.
There are many examples of species-jumping diseases from Small Pox (related to cow pox) to the Flu (a duck disease). These articles are interesting but they jump disturbingly between unrelated items as if they were obviously related (e.g., between oral and injected vaccines). This is a common characteristic of questionable theories. This article relies heavily on the idea that correllation suggest causation. It might and it might not. It is also entirely possible that the article gets it half-right (e.g., that needle reuse increased the incidence and range of the disease).
...and then show his sexual partners his purple Kaposi’s Sarcoma blotches, saying, ‘Gay cancer. Maybe you’ll get it’
A virus without much chance of transmission tends to be kinder to its hosts. If the hosts offer lots of opportunities to the virus for the infection others, the virus no longer has an advantage t keeping its hosts alive.
Her conclusion, when I asked her directly, is that the virus could not have occurred naturally- it was man-made.
I am so glad you made this post.
I also have some close friends in the medical profession. Two of them work in research facilities. One in Houston and the other in San Fransisco.
They both have been telling me this for some years now.
They have told me several of their co- workers are of the same opinion.
Just thought I'd mention it for what it's worth.
Here is Part II:
Did Modern Medicine Spread an
Epidemic?
After decades, and millions of injections, scientists are asking
the chilling question
The two men met purely by chance.
On an October 1997 flight from New York City to New Orleans, virologist Preston Marx noticed the passenger in the aisle seat was reading an article about one of his colleagues at an AIDS research center in Manhattan.
The passenger, Ernest Drucker, was a professor at New York's Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and he told Marx he had been studying the role of unsterile needles in the upsurge of AIDS among heroin users in Asia, South America and West Africa.
Marx was captivated. For years he had been searching for the origin of the AIDS epidemic. He was a primate researcher who had been one of the first to trace a virus in monkeys that was remarkably similar to HIV. Later, during field trips to West Africa, Marx had become convinced the simian virus had been crossing the species barrier to humans for centuries.
But for the past few years he had been trying to figure out why the AIDS epidemic had only erupted in the middle of the 20th century.
As the flight to New Orleans wore on, Marx and Drucker began to talk about the injection campaigns that had rolled through Africa during the 1950s, a period of swashbuckling medical optimism when the World Health Organization and other relief agencies launched massive programs to eradicate disease.
The two men knew that the reuse of needles during those campaigns certainly could have spread HIV from patient to patient. But could the contaminated needles themselves actually have transformed the relatively harmless simian virus into a deadly killer that has claimed the lives of more than 20 million people?
It was a terrible question because it raised the chilling possibility that one of the most devastating epidemics in history had been inadvertently caused by an intervention of modern medicine.
But Marx and Drucker were not the only ones to raise that question - and the hypothesis they would eventually develop would never be as controversial as a rival theory being advanced by a former BBC reporter named Edward Hooper.
Hooper's Theory
London, 1997
For seven years, Hooper had researched a book about the genesis of AIDS. He reviewed thousands of pages of medical records, scientific papers and government documents, and he conducted more than 600 interviews in Africa, Europe and the United States.
A literature major in college, Hooper taught himself molecular biology, virology, geography, primatology and other disciplines. He analyzed virtually every plausible theory about the origin of the AIDS epidemic.
And the more he learned, the more he came to believe the AIDS epidemic had been caused by an oral polio vaccine given to hundreds of thousands of people in Central Africa in the late 1950s.
The vaccine had been developed by acclaimed virologist Hilary Koprowski, director of the Wistar Institute of Philadelphia, and Hooper believed monkey kidney tissue used to grow the vaccine may have been contaminated with a simian virus genetically related to HIV.
During his research, Hooper learned that in the 1950s approximately 400 captured chimpanzees had been used for polio research at Wistar's Camp Lindi near Stanleyville (present-day Kisangani in Democratic Republic of the Congo).
Koprowski and other Wistar officials insisted the chimpanzees at Camp Lindi were used only to test the safety and efficacy of the vaccine. They said the polio vaccine was produced in kidney tissue taken from Asian macaque monkeys only - not chimpanzees.
But Hooper found evidence that some Camp Lindi chimpanzees were killed and their kidneys sent to the Wistar laboratories in Philadelphia and possibly Belgium, where the vaccines used in Africa were apparently made.
From records and interviews, Hooper located the rural villages where the Wistar vaccine had been administered between 1957 and 1960 in former Belgian colonies now called the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda and Burundi. Then he screened the records of HIV-positive blood samples collected in Africa before 1981.
He found that 47 of the 52 HIV-positive blood samples came from villages where the Wistar vaccine was administered. And all the samples were taken within 100 miles of vaccination sites, including several not far from the Ugandan village along Lake Victoria where a decade earlier dying villagers first told him about a mysterious disease they called "slim."
It was compelling circumstantial evidence for a theory that Hooper knew the scientific community didn't want to hear. For years some of the world's leading science journals had declined to publish articles - or even letters - that discussed it.
But as far as Hooper was concerned, he had made a case that could no longer be ignored. And in late 1997, he plunged into writing the book's final draft.
The Wrong Chimpanzees
Birmingham, Alabama, 1999
For months, Dr. Beatrice Hahn and her colleagues at the University of Alabama carefully studied the viruses they found in blood samples taken from four chimpanzees.
Three of the chimpanzees were from a subspecies (Pan troglodytes troglodytes) found in the West African nations of Cameroon and Gabon. The fourth was from another subspecies (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthi) found more than 700 miles away - in the Central African region that had produced chimpanzees for the Wistar Institute's Camp Lindi in the 1950s.
By analyzing the SIV's genetic code, Hahn's team discovered that the viruses in the three West African chimpanzees were clearly related to HIV-1, the virus responsible for most of the global AIDS epidemic. But the SIV found in the fourth chimpanzee had noticeably fewer genetic similarities to HIV-1.
Their findings, published in Nature, provided the closest link so far between HIV-1 and what they claimed was probably its primate source - West African chimpanzees.
And because chimpanzee subspecies rarely range far from their indigenous habitat - they are notorious for their aversion to crossing even small rivers -
Hahn's findings cast doubt on Hooper's theory that viruses from the Central African chimpanzees at Camp Lindi had contaminated the Wistar vaccine and ignited the HIV-1 epidemic.
Hamilton's Foreword
London, 1999
Before his book came out, Hooper turned to Oxford Professor William Hamilton to write the foreword.
He could not have found a more respected voice. The evolutionary biologist was one of the most distinguished scientists in the world and had been an early supporter of Hooper's work.
Hamilton was deeply impressed with Hooper's research, even though he recognized that Hooper had not conclusively proved the Wistar vaccine had caused the AIDS epidemic.
In his book, Hooper had not only presented a significant body of indirect evidence in support of the contaminated vaccine theory, he had also analyzed the strengths and weaknesses of virtually every other theory or avenue of research attempting to explain how the AIDS epidemic started. It was a carefully researched and exhaustive undertaking, particularly for a nonscientist.
"The new facts in the case still tend to be widely separated and none by itself amounts to proof," Hamilton wrote. "However, if taken together the steady trend and accumulation has become very impressive."
At the very least, Hamilton believed, Hooper's research and the questions it raised deserved serious consideration, and Hamilton warned the scientific community of the dangers in failing to do so.
"The thesis of ŒThe River' is that the closing of ranks against inquiry may,
in this case, be preventing proper discussion of an accident that is bidding to prove itself more expensive in human lives than all the human attritions put in motion by Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot."
Hooper's "The River: A Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS," was published in August 1999. It is 1,070 pages long. The footnotes alone take up 175 pages.
The book drew widespread media attention. The Los Angeles Times called it "a cautionary tale for researchers." The London Review of Books said Hooper "may or may not have found the source (of AIDS) but he certainly has written a gripping mystery story." The British medical journal, The Lancet, suggested that "perhaps (scientific) opinion will shift once the book has been read."
But reaction to "The River" was far more strident in Africa, where the book prompted calls for reparations and civil suits against individuals and institutions involved in the 1950s vaccine trials.
"If it turns out that the real cause of the current pandemic was bad science, albeit in pursuit of noble goals," wrote the East African, "should not Africa's leaders . . . pursue the matter relentlessly using all legal and forensic resources available?"
Hamilton, a member of Britain's respected science academy, the Royal Society, decided the time had come for a full scientific discussion on the origin of AIDS.
So in late 1999, he began arranging for the first-ever international conference on the subject in London, where Hooper and "The River" would finally have their day.
Millions of Injections
New York, 1999
As Marx pressed ahead with his field work in West Africa, Drucker was gathering data from the World Health Organization, needle manufacturers and drug companies.
Drucker found that shortly after World War II the sudden availability of penicillin and other antibiotics had created a huge global demand for syringes.
At the same time, the cost of syringes plunged as manufacturers switched from glass to inexpensive plastic syringes, and production jumped 100-fold in a single decade.
Armed with the new drugs and millions of the inexpensive needles, the United Nations launched a series of campaigns to combat malaria, syphilis and other illnesses. Between 1952 and 1957, international relief agencies administered 12 million injections of penicillin in Central Africa alone.
The campaigns were a medical intervention on a scale never seen before on the African continent. But the noble goal of eradicating disease was compromised by a widespread failure to ensure sterile injections, and the consequences of that failure could be staggering.
In the 1960s, Drucker learned, health officials in Egypt had waged a mass- injection campaign to treat an illness called schistosomiasis. One result of the campaign was a massive outbreak of hepatitis C, spread through the reuse of contaminated needles.
If hepatitis C virus could be spread through the reuse of needles, so could HIV. But Marx and Drucker were becoming increasingly convinced that needles were doing more than simply spreading the disease.
The Rain Forest
Central Africa, January 2000
In January, Hamilton and two assistants traveled to the dense equatorial rain forest of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, hoping to collect fecal and urine samples from chimpanzees that lived near Camp Lindi to see if they contained viruses similar to HIV-1.
Hamilton and Hooper were not convinced that chimpanzees from West Central Africa were the only source of HIV-1, as Hahn had suggested. For one thing, Hahn had based her findings on the test of a single chimpanzee thought to have come from the Camp Lindi region.
And Hooper had discovered that Camp Lindi also kept a colony of about 80 pygmy chimpanzees, a rare subspecies (Pan paniscus) from the area that also might harbor a virus genetically similar to HIV-1.
The problem was that the area around the former camp near Kisangani was in the throes of civil war. On a collecting trip seven months earlier, Hamilton had been stopped and threatened by soldiers.
But he was determined to return to the Central African rain forest to test Hooper's thesis, and he worried that they might not have a lot of time. The chimpanzees in the area were quickly being killed for food by people starving because of the civil war.
The Eve Virus
San Francisco, February 2000
The soft-spoken geneticist from Los Alamos National Laboratory had some startling news.
Speaking at the 7th annual Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections held at San Francisco's Marriott Hotel, Bette Korber announced that she and her colleagues had used Nirvana, the world's most powerful supercomputer, to trace the origin of HIV-1 to 1930, although the exact date could fall between 1910 and 1950.
At the New Mexico facility, Korber and her team had focused on HIV-1, Group M, the deadliest strain of the virus and the one that has infected more than 50 million people worldwide and left more than 20 million dead.
As the Group M strain spread through Africa and around the world, it had mutated, branching out to form 11 viral subtypes, according to Korber. By unwinding the genetic clock and tracing those branches back to the HIV-1 trunk,
Korber's team said it was able to estimate the date of the last common ancestor or "Eve" Group M virus.
The team said it confirmed its calculations by comparing their estimated evolutionary history of the virus with the scattered dates of the earliest known AIDS cases - the famous ZR59 blood sample taken near Leopoldville in 1959 and samples collected from 159 other HIV-infected individuals.
Korber acknowledged her calculations could not prove when the virus actually jumped from chimpanzees to humans. The 11 viral subtypes could have branched out in chimpanzees or humans, she told the conference.
But her research was yet another blow to Hooper's contaminated vaccine theory, because it meant all 11 subtypes would have had to have been transferred from chimpanzee kidneys to humans by the Wistar vaccine - a possibility that Korber called "highly unlikely."
It was more likely, Korber said, that the ancestral virus crossed from a chimpanzee to a "founder" human at some point before 1930, then began mutating into its various branches as it was transmitted to other humans - decades before the Wistar vaccine trials took place.
Another Casualty
London, March 2000
After collecting dozens of chimpanzee samples in the northeast region Democratic Republic of the Congo, Hamilton returned to Kisangani in late January.
A few days later, he began feeling ill. He had decided not to take anti- malarial pills in Africa because he had contracted the disease in the Amazon years before and he believed the antibodies in his immune system would protect him.
He was wrong. In Kisangani, he was bedridden with fever and the sweats. He was briefly hospitalized in Uganda and was given pain pills.
Then he returned to London, where he collapsed and was hospitalized with a massive internal hemorrhage. Apparently, Hamilton's body had fought off the malaria, but the pain medication had ruptured a blood vessel. A short time later, he sank into a coma.
In early March, at the age of 63, William Hamilton died. The AIDS epidemic had claimed another victim.
The Trial
London, September 2000
The Royal Society conference that had been initiated by Hamilton was called "Origins of HIV and the AIDS Epidemic," but some in the media billed it as nothing less than modern medicine on trial.
In early September, some of the most prominent AIDS researchers in the world flew into London for the two-day conference - and one by one they presented findings that contradicted the central thesis of "The River."
Hahn explained how she and her team had isolated the probable precursor virus to HIV-1 in chimpanzees in West Africa - far from Camp Lindi and the Wistar vaccine experiments.
Korber described the dating of the "Eve virus," which she had recently revised to 1931 (with a range of 1915 to 1941) - years before Koprowski began administering his oral polio vaccine to hundreds of thousands of Central Africans.
John Beale, a pharmaceutical and vaccine expert, explained that the Wistar vaccine was produced using heat treatment, as well as cycles of freezing and drying, that would kill most viruses. The vaccine was also made with an enzyme that strips the protein covering from viruses, rendering them harmless. Beale estimated that only one viral particle in 10,000 billion could survive the process.
Others observed that the different strains of HIV-1 and HIV-2 suggested the simian viruses had crossed the species barrier more than once, undermining the likelihood that the AIDS epidemic began with a single virus crossing to humans in the Wistar vaccine.
And finally, Dr. Claudio Basilico of New York University Medical Center announced that samples of the seven remaining batches of the Wistar vaccine, including pools 13 and 10a-11, the most likely used in Africa, were analyzed in independent laboratories in the United States, France and Germany. The testing found no evidence of SIV or DNA from chimpanzees.
In the aggregate, the research raised grave - and perhaps insurmountable - concerns about the contaminated vaccine theory.
But Hooper, unfazed, rose to defend the theory that had dominated the past eight years of his life.
He told the researchers that because of the civil war raging in the Congo not enough samples had been gathered to rule out the possibility that HIV-1 had originated with the Camp Lindi chimpanzees.
He disputed Korber's suggestion that the "Eve virus" for HIV-1 most likely crossed the species barrier before 1931. He insisted it was possible the viral subtypes could have evolved in chimpanzees and crossed to humans in the Wistar vaccine.
He said despite Beale's assertion that the virus was unlikely to have survived Wistar's production process, there was evidence that at least one simian virus had survived an oral vaccine-making process.
And he summarily dismissed the laboratory analyses that found no evidence of SIV or chimpanzee DNA in the Wistar vaccine, saying that "none of the Wistar samples which have just been tested were prepared for use in Africa."
And that wasn't all.
The Smoking Guns
London, 2000
Since "The River" was published, Hooper told the scientists, he had also uncovered two new "smoking guns" in Africa, both of them supporting the contaminated vaccine theory.
Hooper said he recently interviewed a veterinarian from Camp Lindi who claimed that two doctors working in the camp in the 1950s told him chimpanzee kidneys were sent to the United States at Koprowski's request.
Hooper said he also interviewed a man who had worked in a lab in the former Belgian colony (present-day Burundi) who told him chimpanzee kidneys in the 1950s were routinely sent to a medical lab in the nearby city of Butare.
There, Hooper said, he found records showing the lab had been involved in vaccine production. For the first time, he said, there was evidence suggesting small batches of Koprowski's vaccine may have been made in Africa itself, using chimpanzee kidneys.
Noting that Butare was a site where the Wistar vaccine had been administered, Hooper said 29 out of 33 prostitutes there tested positive for HIV-1 in 1984, "an extraordinary percentage for so early in the AIDS epidemic."
Hooper adamantly refused to admit the vaccine theory had been discredited. But he tried to end on a conciliatory note.
"This debate is not about blame or culpability," he said. "(Wistar's) research in Africa, though highly secretive, was carried out for a noble end."
He urged the doctors who developed the vaccine to disclose everything.
But Stanley Plotkin, a Wistar official who helped administer the vaccine in Africa, delivered a blistering rebuttal. Plotkin said he had written statements from the 16 members of the team that had developed the vaccine and all of them denied any chimpanzee tissue had been used.
Plotkin also attacked as faulty Hooper's correlation of the earliest AIDS cases with the sites where the vaccine was administered, and he noted the vaccine tested in the Congo had also been administered in Poland and the United States, yet no outbreaks of AIDS cases resulted there.
He told the conference that Hooper's theory was completely baseless. There is, he said, "no gun, no bullet, there is no shooter, there is no motive. There is only smoke created by Mr. Hooper."
Finally, Koprowski himself, now in his 80s, rose to defend his life's work.
In the 1960s, Koprowski had lost the race with Albert Sabin to license an oral polio vaccine, but his pioneering work had played a critical role in the development of a cheap, easily administered vaccine.
"My achievement of developing oral polio vaccines saved millions of lives," he told the scientists. "But now I am held up before the world as the father of AIDS - a mass murderer."
Koprowski categorically rejected Hooper's theory, charging that Hooper "operated with preconceptions without much attention to contradictory data."
Modern medicine and science were not responsible for the AIDS epidemic, Koprowski said, but now Hooper's book could be blamed for undermining the final global effort to eradicate polio.
In Kenya, Koprowski said, Roman Catholic clerics, afraid that polio vaccines are contaminated with HIV, are advising parents not to vaccinate their children.
Deadly Needles
London, 2000
In the middle of the furor, Marx and Drucker quietly waited their turn.
Finally, near the end of the conference, Marx took the podium and presented their theory to the assembled researchers.
He told the conference he and Drucker believed the mass injection campaigns in Africa during the 1950s not only helped spread the AIDS virus but the widespread reuse of contaminated needles actually caused the harmless simian viruses - which usually caused weak, dead-end infections in humans - to become deadly and transmissable.
The lethal transformation occurred through a process called "serial passage, " Marx said.
That process occurs when patient A - infected with a simian virus through a splash of monkey blood in an open cut - receives an injection. When the same needle, carrying patient A's contaminated blood, is reused, the virus is transmitted to patient B.
That sequence is then repeated when the virus from patient B is transmitted to patient C by another unsterile needle, and so on.
In each patient, Marx explained, the virus rapidly adapts to its host's immune system through mutations, growing stronger before it is passed to the next patient. Through that process, the virus grows increasingly virulent until it is not only lethal but can be easily transmitted through sexual activity. The SIV has been transformed into HIV.
The process had already been witnessed in monkey experiments, Marx told his colleagues. Simian viruses became 1,000 times more pathogenic as they were "serially passaged" through as few as three monkeys.
Marx acknowledged that the serial passage of a virus in humans would be a very rare occurrence. But the huge influx of needles in Africa, particularly in the 1950s, exponentially increased the opportunity for serial passage to occur, he said.
And if the those injection campaigns had caused the virus to turn deadly, the responsibility for the AIDS epidemic rests not with a contaminated vaccine but with a different intervention of modern medicine - the introduction of the hypodermic needle.
"The consequences of massive unsterile injecting appears to be another case of unintended consequences of technological innovation," Marx said.
And he warned that if needles continue to be reused in Africa and elsewhere,
new strains of viruses may cross the species barrier to humans and ignite new epidemics.
The Search's Value
Birmingham, Alabama, October 2000
In her laboratory at the University of Alabama, Hahn is preparing to analyze some of the chimpanzee fecal and urine samples Hamilton collected in Central Africa before his death.
But she believes that no matter what the testing finds, Hooper's vaccine theory was largely discredited at the Royal Society meeting.
"But he has done a great service," she said. "He has galvanized the field and refocused research on the subject."
Hahn, who studied under Robert Gallo, one of the co-discoverers of HIV, also has reservations about Marx and Drucker's theory. The timing is off, she said, because the 1950s mass injection campaigns came decades after HIV probably first appeared in humans.
She knows that Marx, a longtime friend and collaborator, is working with Drucker and others to address that question and others. And recent scientific publications have raised questions about the 1931 genetic dating of HIV-1, Group M, by Korber.
Hahn says it is is entirely possible that scientists may never find the precise origin of the AIDS epidemic.
Still, she said, the search must continue.
"Many people ask me why we poke around in the past. The answer is that what we have learned of AIDS history during the last decade is extremely important."
Each new discovery, she explained, moves science toward an understanding of how viruses cross the species barrier and how we might head off epidemics like AIDS in the future.
Marx's Plan
Cameroon, October 2000
In October, Marx flew into the humid port town of Douala on the coast of Cameroon.
Reaction to the contaminated needles theory Marx and Drucker presented at the Royal Society conference in London had been good.
Conference chair Robin Weiss of the University College of London told New Scientist magazine: "It has the ring of truth about it."
Tom Burr, a statistician from Los Alamos National Laboratory, said the needle theory fits with a recent computer study indicating that some event seemed to have occurred in the "narrow time frame" of the 1950s or 1960s that may have resulted in the burst of HIV subtypes.
"Needles works" to explain those findings, Burr said, adding that Hooper's polio vaccine theory did too.
And both Marx and Drucker have prepared papers about their hypothesis for several scientific publications, including The Lancet.
In Douala, Marx was picked up by one of his field assistants in the group's air-conditioned Land Cruiser. Instead of heading south through the dense coastal rain forests to one of his group's field research stations, he turned inland and made his way to Yaounde, Cameroon's capital city.
There he met with government officials, and presented them with a new plan to test his theory. He would collect used needles from Cameroon's medical clinics, providing them with new needles in exchange.
Then back in the United States, he and another researcher from Yale will analyze the viruses they find in the dried blood on the used needles. From the samples, they hope to capture the different stages of SIV as it "serially passages" into HIV.
"We're going to try and catch the virus in the act," he said. "It's a long shot, and it will take some time, but it's worth a try."
Hooper Presses On
Bridgwater,England,
January 2001
Hooper refuses to give up.
He is convinced that nothing at the Royal Society conference conclusively disproved the contaminated vaccine theory, and he continues to collect more evidence to support it.
"As we speak," he said in a interview last week, "new gathering expeditions in Africa (for chimpanzee fecal and urine samples) are underway. Virtually no chimps have been sampled and that must be done."
And recent articles in science journals have also been encouraging, he said,
including the article by two Danish geneticists that raised questions about the molecular dating of HIV-1.
Hooper believes the Royal Society meeting was stacked against him. "I lost the public relations battle at the Royal Society,'' Hooper said. "But there is still a great deal to be discovered, and the debate is not over.''
The sources used for this series included: Edward Hooper's book, "The River"; the late Chronicle reporter Randy Shilts' seminal work on the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, "And the Band Played On"; dozens of scientific journal articles by Preston Marx, Ernest Drucker and other prominent researchers; articles in Atlantic Monthly, The Village Voice, and Rolling Stone; and news accounts of the Royal Society of London meeting in September. The series also relied on lengthy interviews with Marx and Hooper, as well as scores of other interviews with scientists who have been diligently searching for the origin of AIDS.
Tracing HIV to Its Simian Source
The worldwide AIDS epidemic is caused by two distinct viruses, HIV-1 and HIV-2,that experts believe crossed the species barrier to humans from two different species of African monkeys.
SIV: Simian Immunodeficiency Virus Researchers first isolate SIV in 1985 after the virus infects and kills Asian monkeys in U.S. research labs. It is traced to the sooty mangabey monkey, an African species that is immune to the virus but can infect other monkeys. In the late 1980s, researchers discover that SIV and HIV are genetically related.
HIV-1: The Global Virus HIV-1 is linked to an SIV found in chimpanzees.
Experts believe that the Group M strain of the virus came from a single transmission from chimp to human in the early to mid-20th century. Since then, the virus spread around the world branching into 11 viral subtypes. Subtype B of Group M is commonly found in the United States. Group N and Group O strains of HIV-1 came from separate chimp to human transmissions and have resulted in a limited number AIDS cases primarily in Africa.
HIV-2: A Separate Virus
HIV-2 is linked to SIV found in sooty mangabeys. Researchers believe that there are two main subtypes from two separate transmissions from mangabeys to humans. The virus is less infective and it takes a longer period before AIDS appears. The epidemic is found primarily in West Africa.
Locating the Origin of HIV
Camp Lindi
In the 1950s, the Wistar Institute built Camp Lindi in the Congo, where 400 chimpanzees were kept for polio vaccine research. In his book, "The River," Edward Hooper contends that kidneys infected with SIV were removed from the chimpanzees and used to make the oral vaccine, contaminating it and starting the AIDS epidemic. Wistar categorically denies the allegations.
Needle Influx
A recent theory by Preston Marx contends that the AIDS epidemic started with the reuse of contaminated needles during disease eradication campaigns in the 1950s in West and Central Africa. The needles turned a harmless monkey virus into HIV through a process called serial passage.
The Theory of Serial Passage with Contaminated Needles
1. Market woman is infected with SIV when she butchers a sooty mangabey during food preparation. She then receives an injection.
2. The same needle is used on a second person. The SIV from the woman infects the second person. The second person returns for another injection with a new needle.
3. That same needle is reused and the virus infects a third person. The SIV has begun to adapt to the human immune system and grows stronger. The third person receives another injection with a new needle.
4. That same needle is used on a fourth person. The SIV adapts and grows stronger. That person returns for another injection.
5. The virus continues to "passage" through several more persons traveling between them on reused needles. Eventually, the SIV has been transformed into HIV and is virulent enough to be passed on through sexual contact -- ready to start an epidemic.
John Blanchard / The Chronicle
KEY DEVELOPMENTS IN THE QUEST TO FIND THE ORIGIN OF THE AIDS EPIDEMIC SMALLPOX: Between 1893 and 1912, vaccination campaigns to combat smallpox roll across Africa.
SLEEPING SICKNESS: Mass vaccinations to combat sleeping sickness are carried out in West and Central Africa. But during those campaigns, needles are reused repeatedly. From 1917 to 1919, for example, only six syringes are used to vaccinate up to 90,000 people in present-day Central African Republic.
PENICILLIN: Production of the powerful antibiotic penicillin dramatically increases following World War II. Between 1943 and 1949, penicillin production rose from 21 million to 120 million units.
DISPOSABLE SYRINGES: Glass syringes begin to be replaced by inexpensive plastic disposable syringes. Between 1950 and 1960, the number of syringes skyrockets to 1 billion units.
YAWS CAMPAIGN: Between 1952 and 1957, UNICEF's campaign to eradicate a disease called yaws results in 12 million injections of penicillin in Central Africa.
WISTAR TRIALS: Between 1955 and 1960, the Philadelphia-based Wistar Institute administers an experimental oral polio vaccine developed by Hilary Koprowski to hundreds of thousands of people in Central Africa.
THE MAN FROM LEOPOLDVILLE: Blood from a Congo man is collected in 1959 near Leopoldville (present-day Kinshasa) and then is taken with other samples to the University of Washington in Seattle. In 1986, the sample is retested and shows antibodies for HIV. The sample represents the earliest evidence of human infection with the AIDS virus.
OMINOUS SYMPTOMS: In 1975 the first reports of symptoms, later determined to be AIDS, are reported in residents of Africa.
GAY VICTIMS: Beginning in 1981, gay men in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco and elsewhere begin dying from AIDS.
THE VIRUS: Researchers isolate the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in 1984.
A SECOND VIRUS: For more than a decade, Asian monkeys were mysteriously dying in primate research centers in the United States, exhibiting many AIDS- like symptoms. In 1985 researchers isolate the simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV).
THEORY EMERGES: In 1987, a nonscientist from New York City named Louis Pascal writes a paper that for the first time argues that the HIV epidemic was caused by a contaminated oral polio campaign in Central Africa in the late 1950s. He contends that the monkey tissue used to culture the vaccine contained SIV. Pascal submits the paper to numerous scientific journals, but four years pass before it is finally published by an Australian university.
THE LINK: Researchers genetically link SIV to HIV in 1988.
TWO DISEASES: In 1989 researchers discover that SIV carried by chimpanzees appears to be linked genetically to HIV-1, and a second SIV carried by sooty mangabey monkeys is linked genetically to HIV-2, a separate and distinct AIDS virus.
HOOPER'S QUEST: In 1990, four years after visiting a small fishing village on the shore of Lake Victoria, where dozens of villagers were dying of a disease they called "Slim," former BBC correspondent Edward Hooper (pictured at right) begins intensive research into the origin of the AIDS epidemic. His research culminates in the publication of "The River" in 1999.
SPECIES BARRIER: Virologist Preston Marx publishes a paper in 1991 in which he suggests that SIV had been crossing the species barrier from sooty mangabey monkeys to humans, who hunted, butchered and ate the mangabeys, as well as kept the orphans for pets.
ROLLING STONE: Freelance science writer Tom Curtis publishes an article in Rolling Stone magazine in March 1992, suggesting that the Wistar polio vaccine administered in Africa in the late 1950s may have passed SIV to humans, triggering the HIV epidemic. It is essentially the same theory advanced by Pascal five years earlier.
WISTAR'S DEFENSE: Following the publication of the Rolling Stone article, the Wistar Institute convenes a panel of independent experts who produce an October 1992 report that rejects the central allegations of the article, calling it very unlikely that the oral polio vaccine transmitted SIV to humans.
CLARIFICATION: In 1993, Rolling Stone prints a clarification to the Curtis article, saying it never intended to suggest there was evidence showing that the Wistar vaccine caused the AIDS epidemic.
NEEDLE THEORY: Marx and AIDS researcher Ernest Drucker theorize in 1997 that widespread reuse of contaminated needles during disease eradication campaigns in Africa in the 1950s may have caused the AIDS epidemic.
SERIAL PASSAGE: In 1998, laboratory studies show that a nonpathogenic SIV- like virus passed by needles through three monkeys created adaptive mutations in the virus that allowed it to become pathogenic and virulent.
CHIMPANZEES: University of Alabama researcher Beatrice Hahn and colleagues report in 1999 that the most likely source of HIV-1 is a subspecies of chimpanzees found in West Central Africa, not in the Congo area where the polio vaccine was developed.
"THE RIVER": Hooper's 1,070-page book is published in 1999 laying out circumstantial evidence that the Wistar polio vaccine caused the AIDS epidemic.
EVE VIRUS: January, 2000, Bette Korber, a scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, and her colleagues determine that the common ancestor of the various subtypes of HIV originated in approximately 1930, more than two decades before the Wistar vaccine was given to Central Africans.
ROYAL SOCIETY: On Sept. 11 and 12, the Royal Society of London holds the first major conference on the origin of AIDS, assembling medical experts including Hooper, Koprowski, Korber, Hahn, Marx and Drucker. Hooper's theory comes under intense scrutiny, and Marx and Drucker announce that they now believe the reuse of contaminated needles not only spread the AIDS virus but triggered the mutation of SIV to HIV in humans.
E-mail William Carlsen at wcarlsen@sfchronicle.com.
There were also posts awhile back about:
1. A scientist, peter somebody, who claims AIDS is just Kaposi's sarcoma and that the real problem is unsanitary needles and that the gay community and the sex-for-pay types, here anyway, primarily move the virus thru contaminated needles. i am inclined to believe him somewhat since the dominant media shouted him down. There was one HHS or CDC brief that agreed with him also.
2. Also, wasnt there mention that the gummint funded some effort to develop just such a virus back in 1960 or so?
Informative article. Thanks for posting.
I believe you are talking about Peter Duesberg. Yeah, he's been a thorn in the AIDS establishment's side for years. He essentially holds, as I recall, that lifestyle plays a large role in one's susceptibility to AIDS and that HIV may not be the true causal factor for AIDS.
It appears that Hooper, the subject of the above piece, is orthodox in holding that a retrovirus, HIV, accounts for the disease.
Hooper's theory is very compelling. If conclusive evidence surfaces, Wistar and the Belgian government, not to mention the U.S. Government, may have to dig deep to pay off the claimants for damages.
It is interesting to note in David Horowitz's book "Radical Son", he recounts his early investigation of the AIDS epidemic. In the early 1980's, AIDS was virtually unknown, except as a disease in the gay community in places like San Francisco. Horowitz discovered to his horror that AIDS was being spread like wildfire through sexual contact at homosexual bathhouses in San Francisco, the evidence was there, and yet the city and/or gay community refused to close them, as that would be hurt "gay liberation" and the homosexual agenda.
Here is a quote from Horowitz's book "Radical Son":
"At Shilt's suggestion, I also interviewed a lesbian nurse named Catherine Cusic, who was an official of the HArvey Milk Club and a care provider for AIDS patients. SHe had watched gay lovers die in each other's arms, and had comforted the families who came to pay their sons a last goodbye. Her testimony was chilling: "There are leaders in this community," she said, "who don't want people to know the truth. Their attitude is that it is bad for business, bad for the gay image. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, are going to die because of this attitude. This whole thing borders on the homicidal."
Terrible, sad, and unconscionable.
AIDS:..."ANALLY..INJECTED..DEATH..SENTENCE".....
Thanks for posting this review. It's great to see how nicely science can fire a bullet into the brain of whacked-out conspiracies. It's sad to know that the monster will continue shuffling around wreaking havoc because its life depends not on rational thought but upon imagination and fear, both fueled by interested parties with their own agendas having nothing to do with truth.
Henry Waxman helped keep the bath houses open even though it was know that AIDS was being spread from these bath houses. The epidemiolgy was correct even though the infectious agent wasn't known. I blame Waxman for a lot of the problem.
Alissa's comments are cogent here. The suggested pathways just don't exist.
How many times have you been told that the virus is difficult to spread from female to male?... As proof, the theory's advocates pointed to the soaring prevalence of AIDS among African soldiers and prostitutes in cities and along the truck routes criss-crossing Africa.
If anyone cares to look, a host of virus confirmations were made on US soldiers who partook of infected German prostitutes, used condoms, and purchased only gential-to-genital sex or oral-to-genital sex. Best explanation has been the virus ferried its way into their bodiees via pubic hair follicles.
Moral of the story?... Don't believe everything made public information by the CDC ... the German link was hushed by the CDC, along with proof of mosquitoes as disease vectors. I wonder what else the CDC and our government aren't telling you?... Are y'all aware of the link between human papiloma virus and cancers? Did y'all know that the virus known as herpes ... well, never mind.
Your friends should take a look at the collection of information offered by the FR bloodhounds here.
5. The virus continues to "passage" through several more persons traveling between them on reused needles. Eventually, the SIV has been transformed into HIV and is virulent enough to be passed on through sexual contact -- ready to start an epidemic.
I wonder if serial passage could be responsible for other viral diseases' becoming virulent enough to spread through sexual contact, like hepatitis.
The points you raise are addressed in Part II of the article, which can be found HERE.
Your refutation takes into account Hahn's analysis, but what do you say about Marx and Drucker's theory citing dirty needles as the culprits? And why did the disease---moseying lazily along for decades, even centuries---become deadly? What "natural" mechanism ratcheted up its strength? The "truck route" and "end of colonialism" stuff seems no more plausible than anything Hooper, or Marx and Drucker have to offer.
If you are willing to cast a critical eye on politicized "science" ... Book: Why We Will Never Win The War On Aids by Brian J. Ellison and Peter H. Deusberg The first several chapters are excellent refutations of politicized science and correlation=causation thinking Web: http://www.virusmyth.net/aids/
... oops. The point being that more and more scientist don't even believe HIV is the cause of aids.
HPV and many cancers or HPV and cervical cancer? I think I first heard them linked about a year ago.
It is mentioned in the current Parents magazine.
An angle I'd not considered with respect to "privacy". Thanks.
Thanks Mad ... been awhile ... trust you are well.
Pointy, in addition to the excellent threads we've had on the Blood Trail, I have some excellent research in the archives by Randy Engel I will try to link to your Part Two.
HIV doesn't cause AIDS. Just read the book "Inventing the Aids Virus". AIDS exists, but it is from several sources relating to drug use, tainted blood, and overuse of anti-biotics.
When the HPV shows up in breast cancer biopsies, it cannot have gotten there by oral transmission, only metastisization from somewhere else in the body ... and not likely the cancer metastisizing, the virus transit thus causing the cancerous changes in breast tissue.
I am no longer in the health field daily, so I cannot claim to be current on the datas.
How many times have you been told that the virus is difficult to spread from female to male?... As proof, the theory's advocates pointed to the soaring prevalence of AIDS among African soldiers and prostitutes in cities and along the truck routes criss-crossing Africa.
AIDS apparently spreads easily thru heterosexual sex in Africa. It equally obviously does not do so easily in the US, or we would have an epidemic many times worse than the one we have.
What few PC Americans want to admit is that heterosexual sex in Africa is very different from what is in this country.
1. The rate of infection with other and multiple STDs is far higher, which can presumably act as co-factors weakening the immune system and allowing it to be more susceptible to HIV infection. In addition, a great many Africans have malaria and a host of other chronic infections, which obviously weaken their resistance.
2. Promiscuity in many African cultures, especially on the part of prominent men, is routine at a level to which Bill Clinton can only aspire. It is not greatly different from the frequency of partners common in the gay community here.
3. Many Africans in the affected areas practice female genital mutilation (or circumcision, if you prefer). This can create tissue trauma which never fully heals and tears easily during intercourse, causing a direct blood exposure.
4. Many African men insist on "dry sex," in which the women reduce natural lubrication by the use of herbs, detergents, etc. This obviously increases the risk of tearing and therefore direct exposure to blood.
Heterosexual sex in many parts of Africa is dramatically different from its patterns in America. These differences are more than sufficient to explain why the transmission rates during heterosexual sex are so very different.
You are thinking of peter duesberg who wrote the book I mentioned.
He states that there has NEVER been a double blind study that proves HIV causes AIDS.
He believes that AIDS in America is caused by three things.
First: Homesexuals using inhalant drugs depress their immune system and over time destroy it.
Second: Homesexuals who use antibiotics several times a week to combat stuff they pick up while having several sexual partners in an evening depress their immune system and over time destroy it.
Third, and not prevalent anymore, is the miniscule number of aids patients that contracted it from blood transfusions. These were only the severest cases of Hemopheliacs (sp?)who received three or more transfusions a week (Ryan White was three times per week). They all got blood that had not had foreign proteins filtered out. They did not know about this 15 years ago, but do now, and that is why no more hemoph. get aids from blood transfusions.
He also states that the cause of the African aids epidemic is actually a money problem. The U.N. gives money to build hospitals and clinics where aids is a problem. So cases of malaria and anything else is diagnosed as aids, and when the figures on aids deaths are added up, viola, money for a new clinic arrives. I am no scientist, but this book makes a compelling case for a big time screw up by the NIH. INVENTING THE AIDS VIRUS. Get it and read it, then read it again.
Although there is a virus called HIV, it has not been proven to cause a disease, and is easily destroyed by a healthy immune system. Write all you want about this disease called AIDS, supposedly caused by a virus, it is not proven, and will be disproven over time. Before you start telling people about the epidemic of AIDS in Africa, tell them how it is diagnosed, how many die without even having a test for HIV infection. Many people are dying, but they're dying from the same things they have been dying from for years. a different view
Second: Homesexuals who use antibiotics several times a week to combat stuff they pick up while having several sexual partners in an evening depress their immune system and over time destroy it.
It's interesting that it would not have been possible for the level of sexual activity associated with the "gay culture" of the seventies to have existed during any previous period. Without constant use of modern antibiotics, those participating in such behavior would quickly have died from the non-AIDS infections they picked up.
Link to that one More opinion on HIV+ does not = AIDS
How awful!! I'm going to start looking for more information on this.
Thanks for the heads up!
Thank you. I am a new "Freeper" as you will see if you check my profile page.
I assure you that the recommendation has already been made to them.
I find FR to be the greatest resource of timely information that I have ever discovered.
In Fact, I am constantly recommending FR to many people as THE Prime Source for Great Insight into what is happening in the world today. :)
I Am Not an Expert. I simply offer that of which I have gained some knowledge, as do most people who use this medium.
That may or may not be correct in all cases.
That is what this forum is all about.
In A Word:
LEARNING
As Old As I Am, I Am Not Too Old To Learn :)
By the way in his book, Duesberg mention that of the male gay community only about 2% have aids, and they are all the ones that are extremely promiscuous.
By extremely promisuous he means three nights a week, 4 or more parnters. They overuse antibiotics by taking them before going out to places like bathhouses and clubs for sexual encounters.
Great thread, really first rate, top notch. Thank you.
bump
it is impossible for the virus to jump species, as has been believed thus far Sorry I can't let that go unanswered. The incidence of virus infection across species is well known and well documented. Many infections easily cross a species barrier especially in similar animals.
Several articles in medical journals recently have even shown household pets to be a infection vector for such viral and bacterial diseases as the common cold and strep. A quick search came up with this article you may want to look at.
Certainly a few homosexuals are considered promiscuous even by others of their own persuasion. However, the word almost has different meanings when applied to homosexuals or heterosexuals. The average homosexual is extremely promiscuous when compared to the average heterosexual.
Here is a good start, Dianna.
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Morning bump.
Interesting post.
I seem to recall reading that there is a possibility that AIDS like symptoms lurked around Africa since the 30s - and that the first North American case was likely a 15 year old St. Louis hustler who died in the mid to late 1960s.
HIV doesn't cause AIDS.
You may be right. The jury is still out.
Thanks, Maddie. All serious inquirers are welcome. I might note, though, that the AIDS origin question -- as you might expect with an incurable disease -- stirs strong and sometimes ditsy views. Our charge as "Bloodhounds" is to investigate the Arkansas tainted blood story and to pursue justice for the victims. The origin of AIDS is essentially irrelevant. Rather, we track the spread of HIV, HCV and other blood-borne pathogens through transfusions and contaminated blood products.
Just read the book "Inventing the Aids Virus".
It's not exactly a Sunday afternoon light read, but it's well worth the effort. It cuts through the junk science and urban legend of the AIDS industry.
Were not Castro's troops in Africa helping establish communism
Yes, yes! Angola-- casuaties were so heavy they kept bodies in refrigerator ships off shore so they could "trickle" them back to Cuba & avoid upsetting the inmates of the worker's paradise.
I repeat (endlessly to you, but you never seem to pay attention), HIV has never been PROVEN to cause Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. NEVER! Any story or premise attempting to "discern" or "lay blame" for AIDs on a harmless, ubiquitous retrovirus is perpetrating a fraud. First, prove that HIV causes AIDs, then proceed to theorize. Not bass ackwards.
I am so often reminded of the "Darwinists" that grace this web site who always cite their "conviction" that naturalism is well proven.
Show me the money boys! But you haven't even got pocket change on either of these arguments. Science "should" work in a rational and straight forward way with peer review enforcing structure and truth. Unfortunately, we have all succumbed to the Age of Media, where any idea suddenly gains credence without the need for verification.
Darned compeling reading. Any time a government "Scientist" states catagorically that someting is impossible, my suspicion meter goes nuts.
According to Salk, the AIDS virus has been around since the 11th century. But, leave it to "British Science" to find SOMETHING to be wrong about. They have been so wrong so many times....but they so much like to stir up whacky theories. And that's what I think this is.
This IS a dog&pony show.
NIAID Fact Sheet: The Evidence That HIV Causes AIDS
National Institutes of Health, National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease - July 1995
Between June 1981 and December 31, 1994, physicians reported 441,528 cases of AIDS, including 270,870 AIDS-related deaths, to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). AIDS is now the leading cause of death among adults aged 25 to 44 in the United States.
This document summarizes the abundant evidence that HIV causes AIDS. Questions and answers at the end of this document address the specific claims of those who assert that HIV is not the cause of AIDS.
Definition of AIDS
The CDC currently defines AIDS in an adult or adolescent age 13 years or older as the presence of one of 25 conditions indicative of severe immunosuppression associated with HIV infection, such as Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP), or HIV infection in an individual with a CD4+ T cell count less than 200/cells per cubic millimeter (mm3) of blood. In children younger than 13 years, the definition of AIDS is similar to that in adolescents and adults, except that lymphoid interstitial pneumonitis and recurrent bacterial infections are included in the list of AIDS-defining conditions.
The designation "AIDS" is a surveillance tool. Surveillance definitions of AIDS have proven useful epidemiologically to track and quantify the recent epidemic of HIV-mediated immunosuppression and its manifestations. However, AIDS represents only the end stage of a continuous, progressive pathogenic process, beginning with primary infection with HIV, continuing with a chronic phase that is usually asymptomatic, and leading to progressively severe symptoms and, ultimately, profound immunodeficiency and opportunistic infections and cancers.
Before the appearance of HIV, AIDS-like syndromes were rare; today, they are common in HIV-infected individuals.
Prior to the appearance of HIV, AIDS-related conditions such as Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP), Kaposi's sarcoma (KS) and disseminated infection with the Mycobacterium avium complex (MAC) were extraordinarily rare in the United States. In a 1967 survey, only 107 cases of PCP in this country had been described in the medical literature, virtually all among individuals with underlying immunosuppressive conditions. Before the AIDS epidemic, the annual incidence of Kaposi's sarcoma in the United States was 0.021 to 0.061 per 100,000, and only 32 individuals with disseminated MAC disease had been described in the medical literature.
By December 31, 1994, physicians had reported to the CDC 127,626 patients with AIDS in the United States with definitive diagnoses of PCP, 36,693 with KS and 28,954 with disseminated MAC.
AIDS and HIV infection are invariably linked in time, place and population group.
Historically, the occurrence of AIDS-like illnesses in populations has closely followed the appearance of HIV. The first cases of AIDS in homosexual men in San Francisco were detected in 1981, and retrospective examination of frozen blood samples from a cohort of gay men showed the presence of HIV antibodies as early as 1978 but not before then. Subsequently, in every country and city where AIDS has appeared, evidence of HIV infection has preceded AIDS by just a few years. In Thailand, for example, the explosion of AIDS cases followed a dramatic increase in HIV seroprevalence rates.
The main risk factors for AIDS -- sexual contact between men and between men and women, transfusions, treatment for hemophilia and needle-sharing during injection-drug use -- have existed for years, increasing only in a relative sense in recent years.
If, as argued by some, these factors were themselves immunosuppressive, one would expect to have seen a large number of AIDS-like syndromes among prostitutes (male or female), HIV-seronegative blood recipients, hemophiliacs and users of recreational drugs prior to the appearance of HIV. Reviews of the medical literature, autopsy records and tumor registries indicate that such cases were extraordinarily rare.
Many studies agree that only a single factor, HIV, predicts whether a person will develop AIDS.
Other viral infections, bacterial infections, sexual behavior patterns and drug abuse patterns do not predict who develops AIDS. Individuals from diverse backgrounds, including heterosexual men and women, homosexual men and women, hemophiliacs, sexual partners of hemophiliacs and transfusion recipients, injection-drug users and infants have all developed AIDS, with the only common denominator being their infection with HIV.
Numerous serosurveys show that AIDS is common in populations where many individuals have HIV antibodies. Conversely, in populations with low seroprevalence of HIV antibodies, AIDS is extremely rare.
For example, Malawi, an African country with high seroprevalence of HIV antibodies, had reported 34,167 cases of AIDS to the WHO as of December 31, 1994. In contrast, Madagascar, an island country off the southeast coast of Africa with a very low seroprevalence of HIV antibodies, reported only 9 cases of AIDS to the WHO through December 31, 1994.
In cohort studies, severe immunosuppression and AIDS-defining illnesses occur exclusively in individuals who are HIV-infected.
Conversely, matched controls, individuals with similar lifestyles but without HIV infection, virtually never suffer these symptoms.
For example, in one cohort in Vancouver, investigators followed 715 homosexual men for a median of 8.6 years. Every case of AIDS in this cohort occurred in individuals who were positive for HIV antibodies. No AIDS-defining illnesses occurred in men who remained negative for HIV antibodies, despite the fact that these men had appreciable patterns of illicit drug use and receptive anal intercourse.
The specific immunologic profile that typifies AIDS -- a persistently low CD4+ T cell count -- is extraordinarily rare in the absence of HIV infection or other known cause of immunosuppression.
For example, in the NIAID-supported Multicenter AIDS Cohort Study (MACS), 22,643 CD4+ T cell determinations in 2,713 HIV-seronegative homosexual men revealed only one individual with a CD4+ T cell count persistently lower than 300 cells/mm3, and this individual was receiving immunosuppressive therapy.
Nearly everyone with AIDS has antibodies to HIV.
A recent survey of 230,179 AIDS patients in the United States revealed only 299 HIV-seronegative individuals. An evaluation of 172 of these 299 patients found 131 actually to be seropositive; an additional 34 died before their serostatus could be confirmed.
HIV can be detected in virtually everyone with AIDS.
Recently developed sensitive testing methods, including the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and improved culture techniques, have enabled researchers to find HIV in patients with AIDS with few exceptions. HIV has been repeatedly isolated from the blood, semen and vaginal secretions of patients with AIDS, findings consistent with the epidemiologic data demonstrating AIDS transmission via sexual activity and contact with infected blood.
HIV fulfills Koch's postulates as the cause of AIDS.
Koch's postulates of disease causation stipulate that an infectious agent must be found in all cases of the disease, the agent must be isolated from the host's body, the agent must cause disease when injected into healthy hosts, and the same agent must once again be isolated from the newly diseased host.
All four postulates have been fulfilled in three laboratory workers with no other risk factors who have developed AIDS or severe immunosuppression after accidental exposure to concentrated, cloned HIV in the laboratory. Two individuals were infected in 1985 and one in 1991. All three have shown marked CD4+ T cell depletion, and two have CD4+ T cell counts that have dropped below 200/mm3 of blood. One of these latter individuals developed PCP, an AIDS indicator disease, 68 months after showing evidence of infection, and did not receive an antiretroviral drug until 83 months after the infection. In all three cases, HIV was isolated from the infected individual, sequenced and shown to be the infecting strain of virus.
In addition, through 1994 the CDC had received reports of 42 health care workers in the United States with documented, occupationally acquired HIV infection, of whom 17 have developed AIDS in the absence of other risk factors. The development of AIDS following known HIV seroconversion also has been repeatedly observed in pediatric and adult blood transfusion cases, in mother-to-child transmission, and in studies of hemophilia, injection-drug use and sexual transmission in which seroconversion can be documented using serial blood samples.
Newborn infants have no behavioral risk factors, yet 6,209 children in the United States developed AIDS through December 31, 1994.
Only the 15 to 40 percent of infants who become HIV-infected before or during birth go on to develop immunosuppression and AIDS. Babies who are not HIV-infected do not develop AIDS.
Because many HIV-infected mothers abuse recreational drugs, some have argued that maternal drug use itself causes pediatric AIDS. However, studies have consistently shown that babies who are not HIV-infected do not develop AIDS, regardless of their mothers' drug use.
The HIV-infected twin develops AIDS while the uninfected twin does not.
Researchers have documented cases of HIV-infected mothers who have given birth to twins, one of whom is HIV-infected and the other not. The HIV-infected children developed AIDS, while the other children remained clinically and immunologically normal.
Since the appearance of HIV, mortality has increased dramatically among hemophiliacs.
The impact of HIV on the life expectancy of hemophiliacs has been dramatic. Among those with severe factor-VIII deficiency, mortality increased six-fold from 1981 to 1990. Median life expectancy at one year of age for males with hemophilia increased from 40.9 years at the beginning of the century (1900 to 1920) to a high of 68 years after the introduction of factor therapy (1971 to 1980). In the era of AIDS (1981 to 1990), life expectancy declined to 49 years.
Studies of transfusion-acquired AIDS cases have repeatedly led to the discovery of HIV in the patient as well as in the blood donor.
Numerous studies have shown an almost perfect correlation between the occurrence of AIDS in a blood recipient and donor, and evidence of homologous HIV strains in both the recipient and the donor.
Sex partners of HIV-infected hemophiliacs and transfusion recipients acquire the virus and develop AIDS without other risk factors.
Ten to 20 percent of wives and sex partners of male HIV-positive hemophiliacs in the United States are also HIV-infected. Through December 31, 1994, the CDC had received reports of 266 cases of AIDS in those whose only risk factor was sex with an HIV-infected person with hemophilia. The CDC had also received reports of 628 cases of AIDS in individuals whose primary risk factor was sex with an HIV-infected transfusion recipient.
HIV infects and is responsible for the death of CD4+ T lymphocytes in vitro and in vivo.
CD4+ T cells are the cells depleted in people with AIDS. Although the loss of CD4+ T cells is not the only immune defect seen in people with AIDS, the observation that HIV also infects and damages these cells in vitro establishes an obvious link between HIV and AIDS. Recent in vivo studies suggest that during HIV infection, more than 1 billion CD4+ T cells are destroyed every day, eventually overwhelming the immune system's regenerative capacity.
HIV damages the body's sources of CD4+ T cells and centers of immune activity.
HIV destroys precursor cells and the structures in the bone marrow and thymus that are needed for the development of mature immune cells. This damage may help explain why the immune systems of people with AIDS do not successfully regenerate their CD4+ T cells. The virus also progressively destroys the lymph nodes, the centers of immune activity in the body. Significantly, in the approximately 5 percent of HIV-infected people whose disease does not progress, the lymph node architecture appears to remain intact.
Studies of HIV-infected people show that increasing amounts of HIV in the body correlate with the progression of the immunologic processes that lead to AIDS.
As levels of viral replication and the amount of virus in the body increase, so too do the various immunologic processes associated with AIDS. Recent studies have shown that a rise in expression of HIV RNA in peripheral blood mononuclear cells precedes clinically defined progression of disease in people with HIV.
In the approximately 5 percent of HIV-infected individuals whose disease progresses very slowly, the amount of virus in the blood and lymph nodes is significantly lower than that in HIV-infected people whose disease progression is more typical.
HIV is similar in genetic structure and morphology to other lentiviruses that often cause immunodeficiency in their animal hosts in addition to slow, progressive wasting disorders, neurodegeneration and death.
Like HIV in humans, animal viruses such as feline immunodeficiency virus (FIV) in cats, visna virus in sheep and simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) in monkeys primarily infect cells of the immune system such as T cells and macrophages. For example, visna virus infects macrophages and causes a slowly progressive neurologic disease.
Baboons develop AIDS after inoculation with clones of an HIV variant that also causes AIDS in humans.
Over the course of two years, baboons infected with HIV-2 exhibited a significant decline in immune function, as well as AIDS-like symptoms.
Asian monkeys develop AIDS after infection with the simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), a virus closely related to HIV.
In macaque species, various cloned SIV isolates induce syndromes that parallel HIV infection and AIDS in humans, including swollen lymph nodes early in infection, CD4+ T cell depletion, opportunistic infections such as PCP and MAC, and death.
Myth: HIV cannot be the cause of AIDS because researchers are unable to explain precisely how HIV destroys the immune system.
Fact: A great deal is known about the pathogenesis of HIV disease, even though important details remain to be elucidated. However, a complete understanding of the pathogenesis of a disease is not a prerequisite to knowing its cause. Most infectious agents have been associated with the disease they cause long before their pathogenic mechanisms have been discovered. Because research in pathogenesis is difficult when precise animal models are unavailable, the disease-causing mechanisms in many diseases, including tuberculosis and hepatitis B are poorly understood. The critics' reasoning would lead to the conclusion that M. tuberculosis is not the cause of tuberculosis or that hepatitis B virus is not a cause of liver disease.
Myth: Behavioral factors such as recreational drug use and multiple sexual partners account for AIDS.
Fact: The proposed behavioral causes of AIDS, such as multiple sexual partners and long-term recreational drug use, have existed for many years. The epidemic of AIDS, characterized by the occurrence of formerly rare opportunistic infections such as Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP) did not occur in this country until a previously unknown human retrovirus -- HIV -- spread through certain communities.
Compelling evidence against the hypothesis that behavioral factors cause AIDS comes from recent studies that have followed cohorts of homosexual men for long periods of time and found that only HIV-seropositive men develop AIDS.
For example, in a prospectively studied cohort in Vancouver, 715 homosexual men were followed for a median of 8.6 years. Among 365 HIV-positive individuals, 136 developed AIDS. No AIDS-defining illnesses occurred among 350 seronegative men despite the fact that these men reported appreciable use of inhalable nitrites ("poppers") and other recreational drugs, and frequent receptive anal intercourse.
Other studies show that among homosexual men and injection drug users, the specific immune deficit that leads to AIDS -- a progressive and sustained loss of CD4+ T cells -- is extremely rare in the absence of other immunosuppressive conditions. In the Multicenter AIDS Cohort Study, more than 22,000 T-cell determinations in 2,713 HIV-seronegative homosexual men revealed only one individual with a CD4+ T cell count persistently lower than 300 cells/mm3, and this individual was receiving immunosuppressive therapy.
In a survey of 229 HIV-seronegative injection drug users in New York City, mean CD4+ T cell counts of the group were consistently more than 1000 cells/mm3. Only two individuals had two CD4+ T cell measurements of less than 300/mm3, one of whom died with cardiac disease and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma listed as the cause of death. In another study, HIV-seronegative, long-term heroin addicts had mean CD4+ T cell counts of 1500/mm3, while eleven healthy controls had CD4+ counts of 820 cells/mm3.
Myth: The AIDS epidemic has been compounded by immunosuppressive effects of the medication AZT.
Fact: Placebo-controlled trials have found that AZT and related anti-HIV drugs can benefit patients by prolonging, for a year or two, the onset of new AIDS-related illnesses in HIV-infected individuals. Significantly, long-term follow-up of these trials, although not showing prolonged benefit of AZT, has never indicated that the drug increases disease progression or mortality. The lack of excess AIDS cases and death in the AZT arms of these trials effectively rebuts the argument that AZT causes AIDS.
In addition, many individuals who have never taken AZT or related drugs have developed AIDS, including people in the United States prior to the availability of AZT, and in Africa today where very few people receive AZT.
Several studies suggest that life expectancy of individuals with HIV disease has increased since the use of AZT became common. One cohort study found that the time from seroconversion to death, a period not influenced by variations in diagnosing AIDS, has lengthened slightly in recent years. Even taking into account the benefits of improved PCP prophylaxis and treatment, if AZT were contributing to or causing disease, one would expect a decrease in survival figures, rather than an increase that coincides with the use of AZT.
Myth: AIDS among transfusion recipients is due to underlying diseases that necessitated the transfusion, rather than to HIV.
Fact: This notion is contradicted by a report by the Transfusion Safety Study Group (TSSG), which compared HIV-negative and HIV-positive blood recipients who had been given transfusions for similar diseases. Approximately 3 years after the transfusion, the mean CD4+ T cell count in 64 HIV-negative recipients was 850/mm3, while 111 HIV-seropositive individuals had average CD4+ T cell count of 375/mm3. By 1993, there were 37 cases of AIDS in the HIV-infected group, but not a single AIDS-defining illness in the HIV-seronegative transfusion recipients.
Myth: Cumulative exposure to contaminants in Factor VIII leads to CD4+ depletion and AIDS in hemophiliacs.
Fact: This view is contradicted by several large studies. For example, among HIV-seronegative patients with hemophilia A enrolled in the Transfusion Safety Study, no significant differences in CD4+ T cell counts were noted between 79 patients with no or minimal factor treatment and 52 with the largest amount of lifetime treatments. Patients in both groups had CD4+ T cell counts within the normal range. In another report from the Transfusion Safety Study, no instances of AIDS-defining illnesses were seen among 402 HIV-seronegative hemophiliacs who had received factor therapy.
Myth: The distribution of AIDS cases casts doubt on HIV as the cause. Viruses are not gender-specific, yet fewer than 10 percent of people with AIDS are women.
Fact: The distribution of AIDS cases, whether in the United States or elsewhere in the world, invariably mirrors the prevalence of HIV in a population. In the United States, HIV first appeared in populations of homosexual men and injection drug users, a majority of whom are male. Because HIV is spread primarily through sex or by the exchange of HIV-contaminated needles during injection drug use, it is not surprising that a majority of U.S. AIDS cases have occurred in men.
Increasingly, however, women in this country are becoming HIV-infected, usually through the exchange of HIV-contaminated needles or sex with an HIV-infected male. As the number of HIV-infected women has risen, so too has the number of female AIDS patients in the United States. AIDS is now the leading cause of death among adults aged 25 to 44 in the United States, and the fourth leading cause of death of women in that age group.
In Africa, HIV was first recognized in sexually active heterosexuals, and AIDS cases in Africa have occurred at least as frequently in women as in men. Overall, the worldwide distribution of HIV infection and AIDS between men and women is approximately 1 to 1.
Myth: HIV cannot be the cause of AIDS because the body develops a vigorous antibody response to the virus.
Fact: This reasoning ignores numerous examples of viruses other than HIV that can be pathogenic after evidence of immunity appears. Measles virus may persist for years in brain cells, eventually causing a chronic neurologic disease despite the presence of antibodies. Viruses such as cytomegalovirus, herpes simplex and varicella zoster may be activated after years of latency even in the presence of abundant antibodies. In animals, viral relatives of HIV with long and variable latency periods, such as visna virus in sheep, cause central nervous system damage even after the production of antibodies.
Also, HIV is well recognized as being able to mutate to avoid the ongoing immune response of the host.
Myth: Only a small number of CD4+ T cells are infected by HIV, not enough to damage the immune system.
Fact: New techniques such as the polymerase chain reaction have enabled scientists to demonstrate that a much larger proportion of CD4+ T cells are infected than previously realized, particularly in lymphoid tissues. Macrophages and other cell types are also infected with HIV and serve as reservoirs for the virus.
One group has reported that 25 percent of CD4+ T cells in the lymph nodes of HIV-infected individuals harbor HIV DNA early in the course of disease; other data suggest that HIV infection is sustained by a dynamic process involving continuous rounds of new viral infection and rapid turnover of an estimated 2 billion CD4+ T cells daily.
Myth: HIV is not the cause of AIDS because many individuals with HIV have not developed AIDS.
Fact: HIV disease has a prolonged and variable course. The median period of time between infection with HIV and the onset of clinically apparent disease is approximately 10 years, according to prospective studies of homosexual men in which dates of seroconversion are known. Similar estimates of asymptomatic periods have been made for HIV-infected blood-transfusion recipients, injection drug users and adult hemophiliacs.
As with many diseases, a number of factors can influence the course of HIV disease. Factors such as age or genetic differences between individuals, the level of virulence of the individual strain of virus, as well as exogenous influences such as co-infection with other microbes may determine the rate and severity of HIV disease expression. Similarly, some people infected with hepatitis B, for example, show no symptoms or only jaundice and clear their infection, while others suffer disease ranging from chronic liver inflammation to cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma. Co-factors probably also determine why some smokers develop lung cancer, while others do not.
Myth: Some people have many symptoms associated with AIDS but do not have HIV infection.
Fact: Most AIDS symptoms result from the development of opportunistic infections and cancers associated with severe immunosuppression secondary to HIV.
However, immunosuppression has many other potential causes. Individuals who take glucocorticoids and/or immunosuppressive drugs to prevent transplant rejection or for autoimmune diseases can have increased susceptibility to unusual infections, as do individuals with certain genetic conditions, severe malnutrition and certain kinds of cancers. There is no evidence suggesting that the numbers of such cases have risen, while abundant epidemiologic evidence shows a staggering rise in cases of immunosuppression among individuals who share one characteristic: HIV infection.
Myth: HIV does not fulfill Koch's postulates as the cause of AIDS.
Fact: Koch's postulates, formulated before the discovery of viruses, stipulate that an infectious agent must be found in all cases of the disease, the agent must be isolated from the host's body, the agent must cause disease when injected into healthy hosts, and the same agent must once again be isolated from the newly diseased host.
Koch's postulates have been fulfilled with laboratory workers and health care workers accidently exposed to HIV, and in cases of AIDS developing after HIV seroconversion in blood transfusion cases. The postulates have also been fulfilled in baboons inoculated with HIV-2 and in macaques exposed to SIV.
Myth: AIDS is not exploding into the population as one would expect if caused by HIV, a new virus.
Fact: HIV is spread by certain types of risk behavior and not by casual contact and is therefore not epidemic in the same way as influenza or the common cold. The more relevant issue is whether the spread of HIV and the appearance of AIDS correlate, and they do.
Myth: The spectrum of AIDS-related infections seen in different populations proves that AIDS is actually many diseases not caused by HIV.
Fact: The diseases associated with AIDS, such as PCP and Mycobacterium avium complex (MAC) are not caused by HIV but rather result from the immunosuppression caused by HIV disease. As the immune system of an HIV-infected individuals weakens, he or she becomes susceptible to the particular viral, fungal and bacterial infections common in the community. For example, HIV-infected people in certain midwestern and mid-Atlantic regions are much more likely than people in New York City to develop histoplasmosis, which is caused by a fungus. A person in Africa is exposed to different pathogens than is an individual in an American city. Children may be exposed to different infectious agents than adults.
Myth: There is no AIDS in Africa. AIDS is nothing more than a new name for old diseases.
Fact: The diseases that have come to be associated with AIDS in Africa -- such as wasting syndrome, diarrheal diseases and TB -- have long been severe burdens there. However, high rates of mortality from these diseases, formerly confined to the elderly and malnourished, are now common among HIV-infected young and middle-aged people.
In a recent study in rural Uganda, adolescents and young adults testing positive for HIV antibodies were 60 times more likely to die during the subsequent two-year observation period than otherwise similar persons who tested negative. In a study in Zaire, infants with HIV infection had an 11-fold increased risk of death from diarrhea compared with uninfected children. Elsewhere in Africa findings are similar.
NIAID, a component of the National Institutes of Health, supports research on AIDS, tuberculosis and other infectious diseases as well as allergies and immunology.
Prepared by:
Office of Communications
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases
National Institutes of Health
Bethesda, MD 20892
Public Health Service
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
July 1995
DT 950701
DOCN: NIAID95_FACT_SHEET_EVIDHIV
This information is designed to support, not replace, the relationship that exists between you and your doctor.
1. There is first the question, raised in many responses, of whether AIDS is even a contagious disease, and whether what is called AIDS in Africa has any relation to the disease that goes by that name in this country. Even the existence of the retrovirus dubbed HIV is called into question by some. (I don't fully understand the basis for these doubts, one has to understand electronmicroscopy(E.M.) technology and how indirect are the conclusions from E.M. observations.) Supposing HIV does exist, one should keep an eye on Magic Johnson. Supposing he is actually infected with the virus (the HIV tests are notoriously unreliable), is he being treated with AZT? Probably not. Doctors are very clever. The worst side effects of their remedies often mimic the disease they are meant to cure. From the time of Paracelsus up to the introduction of penicillan, the only effective treatment of syphillus was mercury, in some form or other. One has to wonder,(as Duesberg mentions) how many supposed victims of paresis actually suffered from "mad hatter's disease" or mercury poisoning. (Al Capone comes to mind.) Similarly, how many people who died, supposedly from AIDS, actually died from AZT poisoning, having been treated with that drug after being found HIV+. Arthur Ashe and Kimberly Bergalis come to mind. We have been so heavily propogandised (a TV reporter never refers to HIV without following with the phrase "the viruis that causes AIDS") that it is hard to seriously doubt the official story. But serious experts in the relevant fields do. One should read Duesberg's account in "Inventing the AIDS virus" of how this official story came to be, in particular, the role of Robert Gallo.
2.A final point. Suppose the official story, the HIV hypothesis, is correct. Then the recomendation of condoms as protection is one of the most cruelly cynical recommendations imaginable. Condoms are only about 90% effective as contraceptives. Viruses are orders of magnitude smaller than sperm. Use of condoms may offer some protection, and thus widespread usage would SLOW the spread of the disease, but, the individual will eventually contract the infection as surely as he would without "protection" if he repeatedly follows the dangerous practices. Of course government has a strong interest in SLOWING the spread.
Have you heard the story of the two heroin users? Being criticised by a 3rd party for sharing a needle, one replied: "It's o.k., we're wearing condoms".
Thanx, Joe, but Doc Savage won't pay any attention to that which doesn't reinforce his world view.
I understand your point. And, from a layman's perspective, it sounds absolutely reasonable, and so I cannot intelligently argue your point.
Her point, however, is that the AIDS virus- at the molecular level itself- is insufficiently similar, to allow a species jump, as some other viruses are... Her explanations, which went well beyond this, were simply over my head...
Were you to debate nuclear power, I could debate the issues, point for point. On this, however...? I just thought I'd put that out there, FWIW.
FReegards,
Then how can the human virus be made to infect chimps?
Honestly, I don't know. As I said, I'm no expert- my wife is. And, I simply put the information out there, For What It's Worth...
FReegards,
Ahhh well thats a horse of a different color. BTW are you (like me) of the opinion that nuke power would have kept California out of this power problem?
January 31, 1999
The research was funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Scientists at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) have discovered the origin of Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1 (HIV-1), the virus that causes AIDS in humans. This finding by an international team of scientists led by Dr. Beatrice H. Hahn of UAB, solves a 20-year-old puzzle regarding the beginnings of the AIDS epidemic which now afflicts some 30 million people worldwide. Hahn presented her study today at the 6th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Chicago. A paper detailing the discovery appears in the Feb. 4 issue of the journal Nature.
Hahn, a professor of medicine and microbiology at UAB, is senior author of the paper. Dr. Feng Gao, research assistant professor of medicine at UAB, is the paper's lead author.
The researchers identified a subspecies of chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes troglodytes) native to West-Central Africa as the natural reservoir for HIV-1. "We have long suspected a virus from African primates to be the cause of human AIDS, but exactly which animal species was responsible was unknown," says Gao. Viruses related to HIV-1 had previously been found in chimpanzees and were given the designation SIVcpz (for Simian Immunodeficiency Virus). However, only three such infected animals were identified, and one of these harbored a virus so different from HIV-1 that most scientists questioned a direct relationship to the human virus.
The recent breakthrough came when Hahn and her colleagues identified a fourth SIVcpz infected chimpanzee and used sophisticated molecular techniques to analyze all four viruses and the animals from which they were derived. The researchers found that three of the four SIVcpz strains came from chimpanzees that belonged to one particular subspecies, termed Pan troglodytes troglodytes, which is native to West-Central Africa. The fourth virus strain, which was genetically divergent from the other three, came from an animal that belonged to a different chimpanzee subspecies, termed Pan troglodytes schweinfurthi, which is native to East Africa. The scientists then discovered that all known strains of HIV-1, including the major group M (responsible for the global AIDS epidemic) as well as groups N and O (found only in West-Central Africa), were closely related only to SIVcpz strains infecting Pan troglodytes troglodytes.
The final piece of the puzzle was put in place when the researchers realized that the natural habitat for Pan troglodytes troglodytes overlaps precisely with the region in West-Central Africa where all three groups of HIV-1(M, N, and O) were first recognized. Based on these findings, Hahn and her colleagues concluded that Pan troglodytes troglodytes is the origin of HIV-1 and has been the source of at least three independent cross-species transmission events of SIVcpz.
While the origin of the AIDS epidemic has been clarified, an explanation for why the epidemic arose in the mid-20th century, and not before, remains a matter of speculation. "Chimpanzees are frequently hunted for food, especially in West-Central Africa, and we believe that HIV-1 was introduced into the human population through exposure to blood during hunting and field dressing of these animals," says Hahn. She further believes that while incidental transmissions of chimpanzee viruses to humans may have occurred throughout history, it was the socio-economic changes in post-World War II Africa that provided the particular circumstances leading to the spread of HIV-1 and the development of the AIDS epidemic. "Increasing urbanization, breakdown of traditional lifestyles, population movements, civil unrest, and sexual promiscuity are all known to increase the rates of sexually transmitted diseases and thus likely triggered the AIDS pandemic," adds Hahn.
"The importance of the current findings could be far reaching," says Dr. George Shaw, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator at UAB and a principal author of the paper. "Chimpanzees are identical to humans in over 98 percent of their genome, or hereditary material, yet they appear to be resistant to the damaging effects of the AIDS virus on the immune system. By studying the biological reasons for this difference, we may be able to obtain important clues concerning the pathogenic basis of HIV-1 in humans and possibly new strategies for treating the disease more effectively." He further added that a better understanding of exactly how the chimpanzee's immune system responds to SIVcpz infection compared to that of humans is likely to lead to the development of more effective strategies for an HIV-1 vaccine.
Finally, the authors of the paper note that transmission of SIVcpz could still be ongoing. "The bushmeat trade -- the hunting and killing of chimpanzees and other endangered animals for human consumption -- is a common practice in West-Central Africa and represents an ongoing risk for humans," says Hahn. "Subsistency hunting has always been a part of West-Central African culture, but increasing logging activities in the past decade have provided unprecedented access to remote forest regions and have led to the commercialized killing of thousands of chimpanzees, gorillas, and monkeys. It took us 20 years to find where HIV-1 came from, only to realize that the very animal species that harbors it is at the brink of extinction," says Hahn.
"We cannot afford to lose these animals, either from an animal conservation or a medical investigative standpoint," she says. "It is quite possible that the chimpanzee, which has served as the source of HIV-1, also holds the clues to its successful control." Hahn and her colleagues hope that as a consequence of their research, there will be additional measures taken to discourage chimpanzee poaching and to preserve this and other endangered primate species.
The team of scientists responsible for the AIDS discovery included UAB's Ya-Lu Chen, Cynthia Rodenburg and Scott Michael as well as Paul Sharp and Elizabeth Bailes from the University of Nottingham in England; David Robertson from the Laboratory of Structural and Genetic Information in Marseilles, France; Larry Cummins from the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research in Texas; Larry Arthur from the Frederick Cancer Research and Development Center in Frederick, Maryland; and Martine Peeters from the Laboratory of Retroviruses at ORSTOM in Montpellier, France.
Wow, we have some smart people that post here. Good researchers, too.
Whatever happened to the theory that AIDS jumped from monkeys to humans through sexual contact (humans raping monkeys)? I ask this seriously.
Did this ever have a scientific basis, or was it just legend?
are you (like me) of the opinion that nuke power would have kept California out of this power problem?
I am not "of the opinion," in this direction, I am certain of it. The power problem is a direct result of
1. Environmentalist wackos that are completely ignorant of any fact which contradicts their preconceived notions,
2. A tampering of the free-market economy by the Kalifornia legislature,
3. Limitations imposed on power plants by air-quality districts (limiting how long a plant can run before it must shut down), and
4. Ignorance of the citizens of Kalifornia, who believe the propaganda put out by the environmentalists...
Basically, the citizens of Kalifornia (though I'm not one of them), who stupidly voted to stop nuke power here, are paying for it with this current situation...
I'm staying for the moment, biding my time until I finish my degree... And then, I'm leaving this feckless, totalitarian state, and moving to either Texas or Florida. Until then, I'll just have to suck it up... But I will NOT raise children here, or put up with the CA legal bullsh!t any longer than I have to...
FReegards.
otay panky
Whatever happened to the theory that AIDS jumped from monkeys to humans through sexual contact (humans raping monkeys)? I ask this seriously.
Did this ever have a scientific basis, or was it just legend?
Pure legend. Monkeys, especially chimps are mean. They'll bite and claw when threatened. Not the sort of animal one wants to be around with your pants down.
The acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) was first recognized in 1981 and has since become a major worldwide epidemic. AIDS is caused by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). By leading to the destruction and/or functional impairment of cells of the immune system, notably CD4+ T cells, HIV progressively destroys the body's ability to fight infections and certain cancers.
Dear Cholera, thank you for the above post. I have read all of this many times. I could assail the thread with documentary evidence of my own opposing your viewpoint, however, having done that many times, it seems rather pointless.
My point is that you cannot show me (by the way I am a biologist - that does not make me right or intelligent, just knowledgable) in the literature the original peer-reviewed controlled study in which HTLV was definitively PROVEN to cause AIDs. And just as you cannot cite me this reference, you cannot cite me a single reference of any other laboratory in the world running the same controlled experiment(there wasn't any), submitting their results to peer review (they couldn't) , and publishing them (they didn't)to definitively validate the original controlled study (which of course doesn't exist).
You know as well as I do that if you tested positive for HIV you would not, of your own volition or on the advice of a physician, ingest a powerful, toxic, chain-terminator chemotherapeutic like AZT to "keep you alive." After all, you are an intelligent person and not subject to committing chemical suicide of this nature.
You know you wouldn't do this because it would eventually be the causative factor in your death.
On the other hand I suspect you probably would end up taking the "cocktail" as currently configured. Frankly, I wouldn't do anything. I would continue to eat healthy, take my daily vitamins, and exercise. I wager I would most likely outlive you substantially. Frankly, I wouldn't worry about it because I am not immunosuppressed, and the chance occurence of coming in contact with a harmless, ubiquitous retrovirus would not cause me to become such.
You are, of course, free to believe whatever you would like. I choose a different ideology.
in the literature the original peer-reviewed controlled study in which HTLV was definitively PROVEN to cause AIDs.
To do so would involve the deliberate infecting of humans with the virus. Unacceptable - or are you volunteering? Everything except the controlled part has been proven and has withstood scrupulous peer review.
Dr. Len Horowitz has documented the creation of the aids virus using congressional records and appropriations. This article is a waste of time.
I repeat (endlessly to you, but you never seem to pay attention)...
You must have me confused with somebody else. This is my first post on this topic, and I haven't engaged in a dialogue with you on any other thread.
Medical Consequences of What Homosexuals Do excerpt
The typical sexual practices of homosexuals are a medical horror story --imagine exchanging saliva, feces, semen and/or blood with dozens of different men each year. Imagine drinking urine, ingesting feces and experiencing rectal trauma on a regular basis. Often these encounters occur while the participants are drunk, high, and/or in an orgy setting. Further, many of them occur in extremely unsanitary places (bathrooms, dirty peep shows), or, because homosexuals travel so frequently, in other parts of the world.
Every year, a quarter or more of homosexuals visit another country. Fresh American germs get taken to Europe, Africa and Asia. And fresh pathogens from these continents come here. Foreign homosexuals regularly visit the U.S. and participate in this biological swapmeet.
Most of the 6,349 Americans who got AIDS from contaminated blood as of 1992, received it from homosexuals and most of the women in California who got AIDS through heterosexual activity got it from men who engaged in homosexual behavior.
What Is "A Homosexual" excerpt
Kinsey's published data reveal that homosexuals are much more willing to "try it" with an animal, a child, a man, many women, or for that matter "something completely different."
A good argument can be made that the "homosexual identity" we talk about today is a recent phenomenon, gaining some currency just before the Second World War, but not really "jelling" until the 1960s-1970s when its social construction was polished.
============================================================================================
Aids originally evolved (mutated) in monkeys in Africa, where it was spread to humans through sexual contact (ewww! Though a freak fluid transfer of another type might have been possible). It entered the heterosexual population through blood transfusions and sexual contact with those who already had venerial diseases (through the open sores). It was transfered to America by ONE man, and we even know who he was. He was an airline flight-attendant who had sex with several hundred other men, thus transfering the disease across the ocean. I suggest you read The Myth of Heterosexual Aids by Michael Fumento. No, he doesn't say that you can't get Aids through straight sex (he's talking about the "epidemic" that was supposed to sweep the nation, but never did). But he does give the actual CDC statistics and odds for Aids transmission. Like, 1 in 3 for homosexual (male) sex for the receiver. Compare this with the chance of a female getting sex from her boyfriend during any one sexual encounter: 1 in 40. Despite all of the talk about "Aids" education, certain lobbies (and we know who they are) have a vested interest in presenting Aids as a heterosexual disease (it's called "funding"). But the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and other scientific bodies have a lot of interesting (and inconvenient) information on Aids. From: Charles H. (The_r0nin) () *07/15/98 01:33:34 EDT
AIDS has been found in African green monkeys and is similar to a class of viruses found in sheep. It may have begun in humans infected through animal bites, eating tainted meat, or bestiality. Some experts say that AIDS began through tainted smallpox vaccine. Syphilis began in the Middle Ages when the crusaders committed bestiality with sheep. AIDS resembles hepatitis B, a common disease among today's promiscuous. (page 110). The AIDS Cover-Up? by Gene Antonio. Ignatius Press: San Francisco, 1987.
Yet at first, the attempts to analyse and understand AIDS in Africa came across to some people (especially to sensitive African political leaders) as an effort to assign responsibility for an international fashion, to stigmatise Africans for their social behaviour. Indeed, certain researchers hypothesised at one stage that HIV had actually originated in Africa, having mutated from a virus commonly found among African green monkeys, also known as vervets. How it was thought to spread to humans was never entirely clear, although one theory implicated bites from pet monkeys and the exposure to blood and internal secretions that might occur during preparation of monkeys for smoking or other forms of cooking in some societies. Beneath the science lurked the implication of some bizarre and improper form of contact between humans and animals in Africa. "Monkeys the Origin of AIDS?" By Masautso Chipako-Times of Zambia, October 10, 1998
The African green monkey is rather small for sex, but widely eaten in some areas with heavy incidence of "slims", which is local term for AIDS. Human promiscuity is also rather prevalent in these areas. Species crossover is suspected to be the result of warm monkey blood in repeated contact with cuts in the skin of the person preparing the animal for cooking. HIV is thought to be a mutant of the similar SIV found in those monkeys. Nothing beyond a casual regard for monkey blood on the hands and normal human sexuality needs to be inferred.
Dear Joe, yes I would volunteer if I felt the study was properly designed, outcomes etc. Doesn't scare me in the least. You keep repeating this mantra of "it" having held up to "scrupulous" review. What was held up. The original "discovery" perpetrated by a proven American fraud - Gallo, and a Frenchman desperate to claim a share of the fame! Show me the money!
As far as a controlled study, thousands of individuals screened for the armed forces over the last 20 years have come up HIV positive (which you and I know is a total misnomer). They didn't have or develop AIDs. By the way, exactly how do you sexually transmit a syndrome that grows by leaps and bounds. There are more "associative" diseases tagged to this poor little guy than any virus (retro - or other wise) in the history of the world, and I quite sure that the CDC isn't finished....well, you never really can be finished in a fraud like this can you?
I repeat, in My opinion (which doesn't count for much I agree) HIV does NOT cause AIDs, and AIDs is not a sexually transmitted disease.
The first time I heard about aids(Valentines Day 1984) was at a heterosexual sex party in the village in New York. There was a gay guy who was warning everyone. It was described as some form of pneumonia that was fatal. Penthouse magazine had a article (1986) that claimed the CIA was trying to infect pigs in Cuba. The pigs were infected and sent to Haiti where some male prostutes caught it from the pigs and spread it to some gay tourist from New York. I really don't know where it came from but it certainly looks like it was generated by man.
Bisexuals serve as 'bridge' infecting women with HIV
DURBAN, South Africa (Reuters) -- Bisexuals can act as a ''bridge'' to carry the HIV epidemic from a gay population to women, US researchers said. A series of studies done by the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows that, in the United States at least, people are returning to risky behaviours that help spread the virus.
Linda Valleroy and colleagues did a five-year CDC study of 3,492 men in seven US cities who have sex with men, and found one in six also had sex with women.
A quarter of those men, aged 15 to 22, said they recently had unprotected sex with both men and women, Valleroy’s team told the 13th International AIDS Conference. She said nearly seven percent of the men in the study were HIV positive.
"The study confirms that young bisexual men are a ‘bridge’ for HIV transmission to women," the CDC said in a statement.
CDC researchers said they were confirming studies that show a worrying rise in risky behaviour among gay and bisexual men — who are still the main victims of HIV in the United States.
Dr Paul Denning of the CDC and colleagues said they had interviewed 1,942 gay or bisexual men living in 12 cities who had just been diagnosed with HIV.
They said 19 percent had at least one episode of unprotected anal sex — the riskiest sexual behaviour — in the year before in 1997 and 1998. That is a 50 percent rise from 1995 and 1996, when only 13 percent of men said they had unprotected anal sex.
"Gay men of all ages remain at an alarming risk," Dr David Holtgrave of the CDC told a news conference.
He said one problem was that men believed drug cocktails that suppress the virus prevented its spread. "They perceive that sex partners with low viral loads present less risk than men with high viral loads," Holtgrave said.
Salk used a killed virus while Sabin used a live virus. I recommend to all my friends when having their children vacinated for Polio to insist on the killed type. The live has been known to cause the disease it meant to prevent. It has also caused polio in mothers who were not vacinated and caught it from their children who had been vacinated with the live virus.
If you doubt that it is transmitted sexually then you probably also believe that the earth is flat. Look at the stats of where it occurs. Those gay guys do more than just read poetry. But give it the ultimate test and engage in receptive anal intercourese with a HIV positive man. You will get to confirm your theory after a short while.
Old news to the Blood Trail here on FR
Hey CJ,we know who was Salks right hand man during the vaccine trials for polia in the Congo. Yup, you guessed it. It was our Tommy-Boy, the blood broker who bought all of the Arkansan prison blood and shipped it around the world for decades.
a bump and a drip!
Thanks for the post Willyone (Interesting Handle.)
Obviously you're a man who intimately understands the Ins and Outs of anal intercourse. Strangely enough, and without the slightest idea you were even close, you have stumbled upon the answer, yet you are far to blind to see it.
You love to make broad sweeping statements for which you offer no scientific proof whatsoever. Where should we start; Koch postulates, the fantasy of viral load; or why by now every sexually active heterosexual in this country should be infected and dying (but aren't); or why Magic Johnson will still be shooting hoops at age 93!
No my friend Willyone, your argument is as valid as a Bill Clinton deposition, as false as Hitlary's answers to the FBI, in other words, not.
Thanks for the flag.
I've cited my relevant experiences before. The 'coach' and I, as the token 'straights', witnessed many a friend succumb to this disease.
Thanks for the links, but I was talking about the ties between HPV and cancer.
UNIVEC Heralds Work of Scientists Pointing to Unsterile Injections as Source of Worldwide AIDS and Hepatitis Cases FARMINGDALE, N.Y.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 13, 2000-- Researchers Recommend Curtailing Massive Unsterile Injecting Warn of Possible Disease Mutations as a Result of Unsafe Practices
The Farmingdale-based UNIVEC Corporation (Nasdaq:UNVC), the internationally recognized maker of auto-disable syringes, is heralding Preston Marx, Ph.D. and Ernest Drucker, Ph.D. on the release of their paper, "The Injection Century: Consequences of Massive Unsterile Injecting for the Emergence of Human Pathogens" at the Royal Society in London at a meeting entitled "Origins of HIV and the AIDS Epidemic."
In the paper, these world-renowned scientists substantiate UNIVEC's long held claim that "continued massive unsterile injecting has the capacity to significantly alter the global ecology of infectious diseases, accelerating epidemic spread of human pathogens." According to Dr. Marx, Tulane University's Director of AIDS Research and Chief of Virology, and Dr. Drucker, Director of the Division of Community Health at New York City's Montefiore Medical Center, the introduction of antibiotics in the 1950's led to an abrupt and massive increase in unsterile injections and transmission of several newly emerged human pathogens, significantly HIV and Hepatitis B and C. The doctors warn that new strains of HIV or other pathogens could emerge as a result of current practices.
"In addition to facilitating the spread of existing diseases," say Drs. Marx and Drucker, "massive unsterile injecting may also have fostered the creation of new ones."
"We hypothesize that the massive increase in unsterile injecting in Africa associated with the introduction of antibiotics in the 1950's was the modern `event' that allowed several weakly pathogenic simian virus, long native to Sub Saharan Africa, to increase in pathogenicity and complete their genetic adaptation to human hosts, emerging as the first epidemic strain of HIV by 1959."
Joel Schoenfeld, Chairman of UNIVEC, said, "these respected experts confirm our call for the exclusive use of auto-disable syringes in mass immunization programs and for clinical use. As the World Health Organization estimates, unsafe injections cause approximately 30,000 new HIV infections, 8 million HBV infections and 1.2 million HCV infections world-wide every year."
"Why does the world's medical community continue to ignore these figures?," said Schoenfeld. "What it should do is stop the practice of allowing multi-use syringes in every immunization and clinical program the world over. Only when we adopt an auto-disable syringe policy, to be mandatory in all mass vaccination programs, will we contribute significantly to the scourge of disease around the world."
The UNIVEC technology is for auto-disable syringes that can effectively deliver vaccines in a safer manner than with traditional syringes. The UNIVEC syringe prevents re-use and the needless spread of disease. The devices can deliver predetermined doses from 0.05 to 1cc needed to deliver medication, including vaccines, which may prevent contagious diseases from spreading.
UNIVEC is a world leader in auto-disable syringes and is leading the global movement for a conversion to auto-disable syringes from traditional multi-use syringes. Traditional multi-use disposable syringes are acknowledged by the World Health Organization to be responsible for the spread of disease to millions of people each year.
CONTACT: UNIVEC Corporation Joel Schoenfeld, 631/777-2000 UNIVEC@UNIVEC.com
free enterprise lives!
a bump and a drip!
Perhaps the monkey theory as the source of AIDS is a red herring. HIV has been shown to have a closer resemblence to a sheep virus known as Vistro. Perhaps this synthetic virus was developed by the US during the 1970s as part of a population control initiative... launched in New York (the first documented case of an AIDS related death was in New York in 1979) as part of a vaccination program on gay volunteers, or possibly on prisoners in exchange for their freedom, or both, and then followed up by a similar vaccination program, with a slightly different virus, in Africa. The first AIDS related death did not appear in Africa until 1981.
Please check out the research on these web sites:
http://homepage.calypso.net/~ci-15476/
http://www.sas.upenn.edu/African_Studies/Urgent_Action/AIDS_Contract.html
did you see this?
I'd missed this. Thanks much for the bump.
nada
BTTT
Back at 'cha.
Thanks for reviving this post.
Thanks for the repost. Teh reallyinteresting part of this concerns the reuse of needles and the serial effect of making agent more pathogenic. This poses a threat to create new infection in the future.
This casts a whole new light on the sharing of needles by junkies. They are conducting random biologicl experments in addition to killing themselves. Scary stuff.
The Origin of AIDS - (the best article I've read on this subject)
Then you should keep reading. What Hooper alleges has been definitively answered, even before publication of his book. Basically Hooper has been cut off at the knees.
The big problem here is that DNA analysis of HIV1 and HIV2 shows that HIV2 is primarily from the sooty mangabey (Cercocebus atys) not the African green monkey (Cercopithecus sabaeus) and HIV1 from a specific species of chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes troglodytes). The simplistic arguments about the African green monkey and polio vaccines have been rendered moot. Of course, that won't stop Hooper from selling his book.
NATURE
ORIGIN OF HIV-1 IN THE CHIMPANZEE
Pan troglodytes troglodytes
The human AIDS viruses human immunodeficiency virus type
1 (HIV-1) and type 2 (HIV-2) represent cross-species
(zoonotic) infections. Although the primate reservoir of HIV-2
has been clearly identified as the sooty mangabey
(Cercocebus atys), the origin of HIV-1 remains uncertain.
Viruses related to HIV-1 have been isolated from the common
chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes), but only three such SIVcpz
infections have been documented, one of which involved a
virus so divergent that it might represent a different primate
lentiviral lineage. In a search for the HIV-1 reservoir, we have
now sequenced the genome of a new SIVcpz strain
(SIVcpzUS) and have determined, by mitochondrial DNA
analysis, the subspecies identity of all known SIVcpz-infected
chimpanzees. We find that two chimpanzee subspecies in
Africa, the central P. t. troglodytes and the eastern P. t.
schweinfurthii, harbour SIVcpz and that their respective
viruses form two highly divergent (but subspecies-specific)
phylogenetic lineages. All HIV-1 strains known to infect man,
including HIV-1 groups M, N and O, are closely related to just
one of these SIVcpz lineages, that found in P. t. troglodytes.
Moreover, we find that HIV-1 group N is a mosaic of
SIVcpzUS- and HIV-1-related sequences, indicating an
ancestral recombination event in a chimpanzee host. These
results, together with the observation that the natural range of
P. t. troglodytes coincides uniquely with areas of HIV-1 group
M, N and O endemicity, indicate that P. t. troglodytes is the
primary reservoir for HIV-1 and has been the source of at least
three independent introductions of SIVcpz into the human
population.
(1999;397:436-441)
Feng Gao et al. Correspondence: Beatrice H. Hahn,
Departments of Medicine and Microbiology, University of
Alabama at Birmingham, 701 S 19th St, LHRB 613,
Birmingham, AL 35294
JAMA Vol. 283 No. 3,
January 19, 2000
COMMENTARY
The recent article by Gao et al1 has sparked a resurgence of interest
in attempting to understand in greater detail how and where HIV-1, the
etiologic agent of AIDS, infected the human population and emerged
into its current forms. The information presented here is clear and
represents a well-designed approach to explain the potential origin of
the multiple subgroups circulating worldwide in the AIDS epidemic.
The major finding of this study, that a subspecies of chimpanzee, Pan
troglodytes troglodytes, harbors a genetic species of SIV (SIVcpz)
that is closely related to HIV-1, provides the first genetic information
that transmission of this virus between chimpanzees and humans
must have occurred in the recent past, giving rise to the current
circulating subgroups or clades2, 3 of HIV-1 in humans. Furthermore,
the authors used mitochondrial subspeciation analysis4 to determine
that related SIVs exist in nontroglodyte chimps, but these are not
responsible for the variety of HIV-1 clades that exist in HIV-1–infected
humans.
Recently, a new subgroup of HIV was identified in humans, bringing
the total to 3: M, O, and now N.5 Also, occupational exposure of
primate handlers in the United States has resulted in the
transmission of a new emerging retrovirus (foamy) in humans, and
although there is no disease, it does indicate6 that zoonotic
transmission of such agents is ongoing. Although the modes of
transmission are not completely understood, it is thought that direct
contact is the most likely route of exposure. These findings have
important implications for understanding how HIV-1 has emerged, but
more importantly, how it might be continuing to emerge. This
information offers new insight into the virologic mechanisms that HIV
uses to adapt to human hosts and can contribute to the development
of HIV prevention strategies such as vaccine design and the ability to
develop new diagnostic tools designed to identify emerging HIV
variants.
Thomas M. Folks, PhD
HIV and Retrovirology Branch
National Center for Infectious Diseases
Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention
Atlanta, Ga
"HIV doesn't cause AIDS. "
Bad science becomes a death sentence. HIV does cause AIDS. Denial is no longer a river in Egypt.
Even if the author of "Inveting the AIDS Virus" is wrong, I am not in denial. I am not in any of the risk groups, high low or otherwise.
Have you read that book? I would be interested in your take on it if you read it?
I haven't read the book, but Arunan's reply covers most of my opinions. I have kept up somewhat with the litterature, Scientific American, Science, Nature, etc., also various annual reviews of infectious diseases. The polio and CIA and other artificial creation theories just don't fit the facts.
The book I read didn't describe a conspiracy, only a medical/scientific blunder.
He likens it to the hundred plus years that the world thought scurvy was caused by dirty living conditions. Several people tried to prove it was a dietetic deficiency and in one case was making progress when an outbreak of scurvy hit a large prison and it reinforced the "filth caused" theory.
His next example was more recent and was used to prove that medical/scientific mistakes are made in the 20th century also.
in the 70's in Japan a company came out with an over the counter anit-diarhetic.
When patients with the flu were told to take this their diahrea got worse so the doctors said "up the dosage". The Diahrea got worse and worse. Over a hundred people died over several years (I think the number was 6 years) before they realized one of the supposed filler ingredients caused diahrea and every time the docs upped the dosage they were making the problem worse.
Now I am no doctor but I know a little about genetics and how the govt. can cause problems by throwing money at stuff.
In essence the theory in this book is that someone announced they had found the cause of AIDS and then the govt. threw money at it via NIH and WHO.
Now nobody who has an alternate theory can get funding to do a study because it is accepted that HIV causes AIDS and any other idea is shut out. He also stated and has yet (I have been watching for it) to be refuted, that no double blind study ever was done to prove HIV causes AIDS.
I recommed getting the book and reading it. It is like reading Scientific American. It has a lot of science, but if you have some basic scientific knowledge you can wade through it. It takes some work and the only part that gave me trouble was the statistical stuff because I have never had a statistics course.
It's nice talking to someone about this. I don't know how this thread got restarted, but I enjoy discussing this kind of stuff instead of guns and politics all the time.
UPDATE: Role of Chimpanzee-Derived Polio Vaccine in Origin of HIV Refuted
My wife recently completed her BS in Biotechnology, from UC Davis. This program specializes in cellular biology,
metabolism and genetic engineering- and study to a far greater degree than MDs.
Her conclusion, when I asked her directly, is that the virus could not have occurred naturally- it was man-made.
Then perhaps she should stay on for a Ph.D. and study to a far greater degree than those getting a BS so she can become disabused of her undergraduate enthusiasm.
Wasn't Scientific American the mag that said Salley Jennings offspring came from TJ, when it was possibly one of 12 Jeffersons? Then their lame excuse was "oh there wasn't enough room to fit the other possibilities in that issue."
one of the greatest scourges of the 20th century?
Nope, the great "Heterosexual Hope" and which can be eradicated via behaviour modification. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your point of view) the only segment of our society being decimated by the disease is the one unwilling to recognize or change their behavior....
I realize this may sound cold,but I know CPR/Artificial Respiration and I would NOT do it for ANY stranger.I learned it for my family only.Just too many unknowns for me.
Boy I hate to come in this late on a thread, but I've spent the better part of an hour reading this through #112, ergo I feel compelled to say "bravo" to both of you for sticking to yergunz.
Doc: HIV does not cause AIDS I believe is quite true. I have a magazine from 1984(?) at home I'll dig out of my archives and type up some interesting facts and post them here. It's been years since I've looked at it but I'll flag you when it's up. It will give you the heebeejeebees about AIDS/AZT.
I believe you can test "positive" for HIV and all that means is that you have been exposed to the virus; possibly your immune system fought it and won, or not.
Which brings me to the second point Aurelius: Magic Johnson and Arthur Ashe! You brought out my standard arguement I use on Joe Six Pack all the time because it is TRUE and easy to comprehend.
Back in the early 90's I worked with a guy, young college age kid bussing tables. His cousin was a friend of Magic Johnson and of course the AIDS conversation came up.
Story was that Magic was NOT going to take AZT or any other drug (faith?). Compare to Arthur Ashe who started taking AZT and was dead in a year.
Thanks youze two for keeping a lively, but long, thread interesting!
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