From: johnson@whitewater.chem.wisc.edu (Art Johnson)
Subject: AIDS and the Congo trials
Organization: Physical Sciences Lab, UW-Madison
Date: Mon, 16 Nov 92 22:04:26 GMT

     The following article appeared in the October 30, 1992 issue of  
Science, on pages 738-9:

------------------------begin article-------------------------------

PANEL NIXES CONGO TRIALS AS AIDS SOURCE

     The jury's in: No one yet knows the origin of AIDS.

     You thought it was ever thus? In its 19 March 1992 issue, Rolling  
Stone magazine captured a portion of the public's imagination by  
suggesting that an oral polio vaccine made by virologist Hilary Koprowski,  
former director of the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, might have been  
contaminated by a monkey virus that mutated into HIV-1, the most common  
form of the human AIDS virus. In the scientific community, a split quickly  
appeared: One camp guffawed (Science, 20 March, p. 1505), but a few  
scientists stressed that the notion was not beyond the realm of  
possibility.

     Now an independent six-member committee convened by Wistar has  
concluded in a 22 October report that the probability of AIDS originating  
from polio vaccine trials held in the Congo in 1957 is "extremely low."  
The new report dispassionately examines that possibility in detail, even  
noting that the "timing of these clinical trials, and the general belief  
that HIV appeared first in central Africa, lends superficial support to  
this hypothesis." But in the end, the committee, headed by Claudio  
Basilico of the New York University School of Medicine, concludes that  
each step in this putative route of transmission "is problematic."

     Then comes the putative coup de grace: The committee points to the  
earliest HIV-1 case yet reported, that of a Manchester sailor in the  
merchant marine who returned to England from a trip to Gibraltar and North  
Africa in early 1957 and developed symptomatic AIDS the following year.  
Since this was just before the Congo trials began--in late 1957--"it can  
be stated with almost complete certainty that the large polio vaccine  
trial...was not the origin of AIDS," states the report.

     A thorough search of Wistar freezers turned did turn up one sample of  
what might have been polio vaccine used in the Congo trials, and the  
committee report precisely details how to test it for HIV or its simian  
cousin, SIV. But the researchers were "pessimistic that such testing, even  
if performed by the best labs using the most appropriate techniques, will  
produce conclusive results."

---------------------------end article-------------------------------


     A few comments. I personally think that the committee is probably  
right that the Congo trials are not the source of AIDS, especially given  
the evidence of the Manchester sailor who contracted the HIV-1 virus  
before the start of the Congo trials. However, the only way to be sure is  
to actually test the Wistar sample for the presence of HIV-1 and SIV. The  
cost of performing the analysis is modest, and the results would provide a  
nice piece of _experimental_ evidence against this hypothesis, should the  
analysis turn out to be negative. While I find the current evidence  
against the Congo hypothesis to be persuasive, it is, to some extent,  
still only circumstantial. Analyzing the Wistar sample is necessary to  
make this evidence compelling.

     One interesting thing in this article is where the Manchester sailor  
was before he returned to England: Gibraltar and North Africa. Does anyone  
know of any information suggesting that AIDS originated in countries  
bordering the Mediterranean, rather than in central Africa?

Arthur Johnson
johnson@whitewater.chem.wisc.edu
Newsgroups: soc.culture.african.american,misc.legal