From: Billi Goldberg <bigoldberg@igc.org>
Subject: Washington Post article 4/5/92
Note: non-commercial reproduction.
Archive-Number: 4820
Organization: UCLA, Computer Science Department
Date: Tue, 7 Apr 92 10:55:09 PDT

The following information has been summarized and excerpted from the 
Sunday, April 5, 1992 edition of The Washington Post with the permission 
of the author, Tom Curtis.

The rebuttal by Malcolm Gladwell, who covers science and medicine for 
The Washington Post, will be also be excerpted and summarized in a later 
post.

This article is not copyrighted.

************************************************************************

DID A POLIO VACCINE EXPERIMENT UNLEASH AIDS IN AFRICA?

Science has accepted the possibility that the human immunodeficiency 
virus (HIV) that causes AIDS is a variant of a virus found in monkeys 
and chimpanzees.  But no one knows how it jumped the species barrier to 
humans.  I am strongly impressed by evidence that AIDS can be traced to 
one early polio vaccination program.

  Many in the scientific community and the establishment media deride 
such a notion.  But the record shows that by 1961, many scientists 
worried about the possible danger to humans of monkey viruses in polio 
vaccines, which are usually manufactured using monkey kidneys.  Indeed, 
when scientists learned that a particular monkey virus--called SV40--
found in much polio vaccine could cause tumors in young hamsters, they 
quickly banned from further use any vaccine carrying SV40.

  Polio vaccines, produced by culturing strains of polio viruses in 
primate cells in laboratories, are injected into or ingested by humans,  
The recipient's immune system makes antibodies that ward off the wild 
polio virus.  Hundreds of millions of people have been immunized, 
perhaps history's most acclaimed public health effort.

  The discovery that polio virus and other viruses could be grown in 
primate cell cultures was a key breakthrough in developing polio 
vaccines and won a Nobel prize in 1954 for researchers Frederick C. 
Robbins, Thomas H. Weller and John  F. Enders, who used human tissues 
for their studies.
  
  But it was later discovered that monkey kidneys used in vaccine 
production often contained previously unknown monkey viruses, some of 
which could infect people--and in fact had done so.  Researchers 
identified scores of simian virus (SVs) in the kidneys of monkeys, 
commonly used to culture polio vaccine.

  After SV40 was discovered, vaccine makers switched from Indian rhesus 
monkeys to African green monkeys.  But in the early 1980s, researchers 
discovered that many such monkeys were infected with a retrovirus 
related to human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the one that caused AIDS 
in humans.  This retrovirus cousin of HIV, called simian immunode-
ficiency virus (SIV), could have been present in any vaccine made from 
the tissues of these monkeys before 1985, the year when sophisticated 
testing was instituted.

  Could a vaccine containing an even closer relative of HIV have 
transmitted the AIDS virus to humans?  And if so, would that 
transmission correspond with what is known about the early occurrences 
of AIDS?

  With the help of Blaine Elswood, a 43-year-old AIDS treatment activist 
in San Francisco, I've found many clues suggesting such a possibility.  
Elswood's research has led me to a scientist whose early, experimental 
polio vaccination program in the former Belgian Congo (now Zaire) is 
today all but forgotten.  After his vaccination program ended, he warned 
Congress about the vexing problem of monkey viruses contaminating the 
vaccines.

  The clues include:

  <> A 1989 article in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 
which, while discussing a possible cross-species epidemic caused by a 
live-virus vaccine, asserted in part, "It would appear that the AIDS 
epidemic may be just on of the latest of several mammalian cross-species 
viral transfers triggered by the techniques of virology developed in the 
20th century, which subsequently spread out of control in the new host 
species."

  <> A 1989 letter from Japanese researchers to the journal AIDS noting 
that most live oral polio vaccines worldwide are still made in kidney-
cell cultures from African green monkeys.  They recommended that monkeys 
naturally infected with SIV should not be used to make vaccines.  In 
Japan, they noted, only kidneys from monkeys free of SIV are used in 
polio vaccine production.

  Elswood and Raphael Stricker of California Pacific Medical Center have 
co-authored a paper, recommended for publication in a science journal 
published by the Pasteur Institute in Paris, theorizing that Africa's 
AIDS epidemic was spawned by a contaminated polio vaccine administered 
from 1957 to 1960 to at least 325,000 people in Rwanda, Burundi and the 
former Belgian Congo.  This is precisely the region where the AIDS 
epidemic rages most fiercely and from which many experts believe it 
spread.

  That polio vaccine was devised by Hilary Koprowski of Philadelphia's 
Wistar Institute, who began the scientific race to develop live oral 
polio vaccine.  Koprowski, a former vaccine researcher for Lederle 
Laboratories, was the first to administer live, weakened polio to human 
beings, initially in 1950.

  Starting in 1957, Koprowski's Congo vaccines were the first ones 
administered to a large human population, sprayed into the mouths of 
hundreds of thousands of Africans.  There was virtually no follow-up, 
which Koprowski blames on the Congo's subsequent independence and civil 
war.

  When I tried out the Congo theory of the origin of AIDS on Gerald 
Meyers of Los Alamos National Laboratories, the chief federal expert in 
genetic sequencing--the science of tracing a virus's evolution--he 
conceded that at least the timing seemed right.  He has computed that 
the common ancestor of the half dozen variants of today's primary AIDS 
virus, HIV-1, entered the human population about 1960.

Moreover, at least one polio researcher thought Koprowski's Congo 
preparation was contaminated--though by what and to what effect (if any) 
is unknown.  Albert Sabin, a legendarily careful researcher, reported in 
1959 in the British Medical Journal that he had found a unidentified 
cell-killing virus in Koprowski's Congo vaccine.  Koprowski has always 
disputed that, saying two other labs found his preparation of viruses 
other than polio.  Koprowski recently told me his were as safe as any of 
the other oral polio vaccines.

  It is unclear what monkey species Koprowski used to make his two Congo 
vaccines.  He first told me he had used African greens but in a later 
conversation said that while he could not document it, he suspected that 
he had first used rhesus monkeys--which aren't a natural host for SIV.  
But he conceded that the kidneys were already removed when his lab 
acquired them, raising the question of whether he could have known the 
monkey species.  Recently he has been quoted as saying he imported SIV-
free monkeys from the Philippines.

  On April 4, 1961, Koprowski wrote to the House health and safety 
subcommittee taking issue with a U.S. Public Health Service requirement 
that live polio virus vaccine be grown in monkey kidneys.

  He suggested that human cell lines be used instead.  "As monkey kidney 
culture is host to innumerable simian viruses, the number found varying 
in relation to the amount of work expended to find them, the problem 
present to the manufacturer is considerable, if not insuperable," 
Koprowski wrote.  "He is faced with the prospect of having to discard 
most of the manufacturing lots of vaccine....  As our technical methods 
improve we may find fewer and fewer lots of vaccine which can be called 
free from simian virus."

  Initially, neither Koprowski nor Sabin thought the unknown viruses 
harmful.  But a leading virologist of the time, Joseph Melnick of Baylor 
College of Medicine told me last fall that the discovery of SV40--which 
caused cancer in baby hamsters--had "scared the hell out of us."

  Weller, one of the trio that won the Nobel prize for learning how to 
grow polio virus in tissue culture, recently told me of the discovery of 
SV40: "It [badly scared] all of us.  Here was a virus--we didn't know 
what it did in man--that produced tumors in hamsters."

  Although they switched monkey species, scientist continued to put 
unknown monkey viruses into the human population.

  Weller said he thought there was a "pretty slim chance" HIV or a 
related retrovirus would be found in old polio vaccine stocks maintained 
by the Food and Drugs Administration (FDA).  Then, he said,  "In 
science, nothing is 100 percent.  I might well be wrong."

  Anthony Fauci, chief federal AIDS researcher, told me recently that my 
story of Elswood's hypothesis in the March 19 issue of Rolling Stone and 
a parallel theory written by Walter S. Kyle in the March 7 issue of the 
British medical journal Lancet had unleashed a "major firestorm" of 
controversy.

  Kyle theorized that the AIDS epidemic among American male homosexuals 
could have been accidentally started in the mid-1970s by an experimental 
treatment for herpes lesions used in New York and California.  The 
treatment: double doses, twice as often as used for polio vaccination, 
of the Sabin oral polio vaccine.

  Kyle--a lawyer who bases his theory on evidence obtained in discovery 
from polio compensation cases--thinks the Sabin vaccine was contaminated 
with monkey retroviruses.  A spokesman for Lederle Laboratories, the 
only U.S. manufacturer of oral polio vaccines since the mid-1970s, told 
me that since 1985, when sensitive new testing procedures were 
instituted, Lederle has sometimes found SIV in early stages of its 
vaccine production process.  The spokesman said such contaminated 
materials are eliminated when found.

  What about vaccine produced and administered before 1985?

  The spokesman said that if you don't know something's there, you can't 
test for it.

  The FDA's Division of Produce Quality Control has stored samples of 
polio vaccine since 1976.  Fauci, director of both the National 
Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and NIH's Office of AIDS 
Research, told me: "If there are [polio vaccine samples] from back then, 
it would seem reasonable to go back and test them using our modern 
techniques."  Indira Hewlett, FDA's senior scientist conversant with the 
test in question, the polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, agrees that 
such testing is in order and would be the best way to resolve the 
question.  Melnick and Robbins also say testing the suspect polio stocks 
would be a good idea that could put the current controversy to rest.

  But Louis Sullivan, secretary of health and human services, FDA 
Commissioner David Kessler and other senior officials so far have ducked 
the issue and declined my requests to interview them.

  Whether or not the Wistar Institute itself evaluates the vaccines, the 
question could be settled by multiple PCR and other tests, performed in 
independent labs by investigators of unquestioned integrity and stature 
outside the United States--preferably in England and Switzerland.