From: Billi Goldberg <bigoldberg@igc.org>
Subject: Washington Post Rebuttal
Note: non-commercial reproduction.
Archive-Number: 4842
Organization: UCLA, Computer Science Department
Date: Fri, 10 Apr 92 18:21:01 PDT

This rebuttal is in response to the article "Did a Polio Vaccine 
Experiments Unleash AIDS in Africa?" by Tom Curtis in the Sunday, 
4/5/92, edition of the Washington Post.  It was written by Malcolm 
Gladwell, who covers science and medicine for The Washington Post, and 
appeared at the same time as Tom Curtis's article.

It has been summarized and excerpted.

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IT'S POSSIBLE, BUT NOT LIKELY

This Theory Leaves Even More Mysterious Questions

  I have not been keeping count.  But it is quite possible that there 
are more theories explaining the cause of AIDS than there are the death 
of John F. Kennedy.

  There is the man from Wisconsin who argues that dioxin causes AIDS.  
there is the fecal contact theory, the malaria theory, the herpes 
treatment theory, the genetic experiment run amock theory, the wrath of 
God theory, and all manner of theories involving pigs, cows and even 
dolphins.

  Now there is the Tom Curtis theory than an experimental batch of polio 
vaccine administered to hundreds of thousands of Africans 30 years ago 
was accidentally contaminated with a monkey virus that turned out to 
cause AIDS.  It is not an implausible idea.  The immediate ancestor of 
the AIDS virus is, in fact, a monkey virus.  Monkey kidneys were used to 
make the African polio vaccine.  And the place and time of the polio 
trial does loosely correspond to science's understanding of where and 
when the AIDS epidemic began.

  But plausible does not mean true.  And the closer one looks at the 
Curtis theory the less convincing it becomes.

  Curtis, for example, makes it sound like there was only one AIDS virus 
that suddenly, dramatically jumped from monkey to man.  In fact, the 
family of retroviruses to which AIDS belongs is hugely diverse, cropping 
up in all kinds of different animal species and manifesting itself in 
all kinds of ways.

  For example, some types of African monkeys carry something called SIV 
or simian immunodeficiency virus.  It doesn't produce the same clinical 
symptoms as the human AIDS virus, but genetic analysis indicates that 
this is the immediate ancestor of HIV.

  Not all SIVs are the same, however.  Monkeys in the coastal forest 
regions of West Africa carry one kind and green monkeys in central and 
east Africa carry another.

  There are also two kinds of human AIDS viruses: HIV-1 appears to come 
from central Africa; HIV-2 is epidemic several thousand miles away in 
western Africa.  Genetic analysis of the two viruses suggests that they 
probably came from the same ancestor about 150 years ago, and they still 
produce a very similar clinical result.  But they are different viruses.  
And they come from different places.

  Curtis's theory, then, based on a trial in what is now Zaire, is not 
really about the origin of AIDS at all.  It is only about the rise of 
the Central and Eastern African epidemic of HIV-1.  This doesn't make it 
wrong.  but it is just one of numerous instances where his theory turns 
out to be much less than adequate.

  Consider all the mysteries created by the Curtis theory:

  <> The mystery monkeys.  The Wistar Institute, the Philadelphia 
research organization that 30 years ago conducted the polio trials now 
in question, either used Asian rhesus monkeys to make its polio vaccine 
or kidneys from African green monkeys.  They now can't determine which.  
But in both cases, Curtis has a problem.

  Rhesus monkeys aren't infected with SIV in the wild at all.  And green 
monkeys, which are, carry a strain of SIV that is so different from HIV-
1 that scientists say it is virtually impossible to imagine that it 
could have evolved into the virus we now recognize as the cause of AIDS 
within Curtis's hypothetical time-frame.

  The point of all of this is that to make sense the polio vaccine 
theory needs something that no AIDS researcher has ever found--a mystery 
monkey carrying a hitherto unknown strain of SIV that closely mirrors 
HIV-1.  Since the Wistar Institute clearly didn't use this mystery 
monkey, the unknown primate would have had to infect either a rhesus or 
a green monkey sometime between the jungle and having its kidney diced.  
At his point the theorists must use his imagination.  Perhaps the 
mystery monkey was in the same holding pen as a rhesus monkey during the 
board ride to America, they fought, and blood from the SIV-infected 
monkey contaminated the rhesus.  Perhaps they had unprotected sec.  
Perhaps they shared needles.  

[Perhaps the researchers spread the infection by using contaminated 
needles and syringes when taking blood samples.]

<> The mystery culture.  The family of AIDS viruses is notoriously 
finicky.  the viruses feed on certain types of blood cells, and soon 
after they find these cells they kill them, which means they need 
constant feeding and attention.  Even if the mystery strain of SIV/HIV-1 
actually did exist in the monkey kidneys, in other words, it's not clear 
it would survive in the cell culture while the polio virus was being 
grown. 

  "When our lab and other labs tried to grow SIV in monkey kidney cell 
culture, we couldn't do it," said Gerald Quinnan, acting director of the 
Food and Drug Administration's Center for Biologics.  "There aren't 
enough cells in the culture capable of supporting the virus."

  Of course it is theoretically possible that there is a monkey kidney 
culture in existence that mystery strains of HIV/SIV find more 
hospitable.  Call that the mystery culture.

[Call it contamination by HeLa cells (human cell line)--see subsequent 
post.]

  <> The mystery transmission.  Even if the mystery monkey and the 
mystery culture exist, the Curtis theory still needs another miracle in 
order to work.  the polio vaccine administered in Central Africa in the 
late 1950s was squired into people's mouths.  This is not an efficient 
way of transmitting an AIDS virus.  Blood-to-blood contact, the most 
effective way of transmitting, results in infection between .03 and .3 
percent of the time.  Transmission by oral contact, although 
theoretically possible, is an even bigger longshot. 

[There is little doubt that the bronchus-associated lymphoid tissue 
(BALT) can be infected from virus being "sprayed" into the respiratory 
system.  I believe that it is the gut-associated lymphoid tissue (GALT) 
that is infected by the oral polio vaccines and initiates a systemic 
immune response (common mucosa-associated lymphoid tissue (MALT) that 
protects the system from future exposure to the polio virus.  This 
involves both secretory IgA (sIgA) and a cell mediated immune response.  

Reference to "The Vacuolating Virus, SV40." B.H. Sweet and M.R. 
Hilleman. (1960) Proceedings of the Society for Experimental Biology and 
Medicine, v105:420-427.

"None of 5 persons developed antibody against the vacuolating virus when 
fed Sabin live polio vaccine on 6 occasions.  These data and those 
obtained more recently by Sabin suggest lack of infectiousness of the 
vacuolating virus when administered by the oral route.  This is in 
contrast to the apparent ability to infect man when the virus was 
administered by the respiratory route."(Morris, A.J., Hiatt, C.W., Conf. 
on Production and Testing Requirements for Live Poliovirus Vaccine, Nat. 
Inst. Health, Bethesda, Md., Aug. 19, 1960.)]

  Quinnan says that if ingesting virus orally really posed a risk, the 
epidemic would have begun long ago.

  "It is likely that millions of people consume food that contains more 
virus than could conceivably be contained in a [single dose of polio] 
vaccine," he said.  "But people don't get infected from eating monkeys, 
so why should they with a vaccine?"

  Quinnan and other AIDS experts, however, stop short of saying that 
Curtis's theory is absolutely out of the question.  Part of this is, 
because in the strange world of AIDS, nothing is out of the question.  
Part of it as well is that most AIDS researchers simply don't care.  To 
them, where the virus is going is a much more pressing question that 
where it came from.

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