VACCINE AND AIDS

National Post - November 12, 1999
Book links spread of AIDS in Africa to vaccine
Polio shot given in area that corresponds to HIV outbreak
Steven Edwards

UNITED NATIONS - A British journalist's nine-year study into how the virus that causes AIDS entered humans has produced new evidence that a Western-backed vaccination program designed to combat polio in central Africa in the late 1950s may have helped spread the disease.

The program, conducted by Belgian scientists, may have inadvertently infected an unknown number of people with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) during a vaccination program of more than one million Africans with an experimental polio virus.

The theory, buttressed by circumstantial evidence, is contained in a 1,070-page book titled The River: A Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS.  The book is written by Edward Hooper, a former United Nations official and, later, a BBC correspondent in Africa.

One map contained in the book shows sites where the vaccination was dispensed from 1957 to 1960 in what was formerly known as Zaire, and another shows locations where AIDS cases appeared up to 1980. The shaded areas of both maps appear at the same locations.

"Over 87% of all known samples of HIV-1 from Africa from 1980 or earlier come from towns where [the vaccine] was fed," Mr. Hooper said. "One hundred per cent come from places within 10 miles of vaccination sites."

The scientists Mr. Hooper identifies as having been involved in creating the vaccine that may have launched the AIDS epidemic categorically reject his findings.

"This book has only preconceptions, there are no facts," said Hilary Koprowski, who, as director of the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia 40 years ago, led polio research along with his deputy, Stanley Plotkin.

Mr. Plotkin added: "The idea is a house of cards built on circumstantial evidence, and whatever doesn't fit has been ignored. It's also, frankly, an attack on people's reputations."

Mr. Hooper admits that his conclusions are not scientifically proved.

Since the early 1990s, scientists have been in broad agreement that HIV is a descendent of an SIV (simian immunodeficiency virus) carried by chimpanzees in Africa.

But disagreement continues over how the virus jumped from chimpanzees to humans.

After completing more than 600 interviews and analyzing more than 4,000 scientific texts, Mr. Hooper concludes that AIDS can be traced to the Lindi chimp colony near Stanleyville, now called Kisangani, in north-central Democratic Republic of Congo, as Zaire is now known.

That's where, in collaboration with expatriate Belgian doctors, Mr. Koprowski established a research centre to test polio vaccines, with financing coming from the Belgian government.

At the time, the search for a vaccine to prevent polio, which had crippled Franklin D. Roosevelt and usually afflicted children, was one of the leading goals of the medical community.

The "starting flag" to test vaccines came several months later when the World Health Organization "advised that [under certain specific circumstances] large-scale field trials could be mounted of plaque-purified live polio vaccines that had already been proven safe in monkey tests and small-scale clinical trials," Mr. Hooper reports.

Before being administered to people, the vaccine had to be "attenuated" so that it could not, itself, cause polio.

To do this, the vaccine was passed through live animals and tissue cultures.

Mr. Hooper says in his book that at Lindi, chimp kidneys were routinely used for tissue cultures.

Indeed, "by early 1958," he writes, "chimpanzee kidney from Lindi were already being used to provide tissue culture material."

By accident, vaccine was produced that had become contaminated by SIV carried by chimps, Mr. Hooper believes.

The vaccine that was administered to Africans in the Congo in the three years up until 1960 was called CHAT, an acronym that no one today seems able to decipher. Mr. Hooper questions whether the letters stand for "Chimpanzee Attenuated" or "Chimpanzee Adapted and Tested."

Mr. Koprowski has said he is sure that chimp kidneys were not used to attenuate the polio vaccine, but can't remember which simian kidney types he did use.

The Wistar Institute has announced it will locate specimens from the 1950s polio vaccine project and have them tested by outside laboratories.

No one has been able to identify a single case of HIV/AIDS before 1957, when the Congo vaccination program began.

When asked about Mr. Hooper's theory, a spokeswoman for the United Nations AIDS program said the same vaccine was used in Eastern Europe, "and there was no outbreak of AIDS there." However, Mr. Hooper does not suggest that all of the vaccine was contaminated - only certain batches.