From: Billi Goldberg <bigoldberg@igc.apc.org>
Subject: Houston Post Article 7/25/92
Note: non-commercial reproduction.
Archive-Number: 5802
Organization: UCLA, Computer Science Department
Date: Wed, 29 Jul 92 09:23:19 PDT

The following information has been summarized and excerpted from the 
Saturday, July 25, 1992, edition of The Houston Post with the permission 
of the author, Tom Curtis.  

This article is not copyrighted.

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NEW EVIDENCE OF AIDS-MONKEY LINK

In the first reported evidence suggesting that people can catch a 
relative of the AIDS virus that kills some species of monkeys, two 
laboratory workers have tested positive for simian immunodeficiency 
virus (SIV).

The new came in a memorandum from the director of the National 
Institutes of Health.  A copy of the memo was obtained this week by The 
Houston Post.

Two scientists said the report added fuel to the circumstantial case 
that AIDS may have resulted from a polio vaccine inadvertently 
contaminated with viruses from monkey kidney cultures.

The federal government is launching two major studies aimed at finding 
out how widespread SIV may be among scientists and technicians who work 
with monkeys or monkey blood products infected with the virus, according 
to the memo from NIH director Dr. Bernadine Healy.  The memo was quietly 
faxed this week from NIH headquarters in Bethesda, Md., to directors of 
the nation's seven regional primate centers.

The second study, now being implemented, "will provide voluntary testing 
for workers at risk for exposure to SIV," Healy wrote.  "I encourage you 
to participate...if you are at potential risk for exposure to SIV."

Healy was out of her office Friday and will be unavailable for comment 
for the new week, her secretary said.  Most well-known AIDS and SIV 
researchers inside and outside the federal government were attending the 
international AIDS conference in Amsterdam this week and could not be 
reached for comment.

"The bottom line is that these viruses do cross the species barrier, if 
this is really a persistent infection," said Dr. William Morton, deputy 
director of the Regional Primate Research Center at the University of 
Washington in Seattle.  Like other scientists interviewed Friday, Morton 
noted that SIV is extremely close in genetic structure to HIV-2, a form 
of the human immunodeficiency virus said to cause human AIDS in Western 
Africa.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration last April instructed the nation's 
blood centers to test blood starting June 1 for HIV-2 as well as for 
HIV-1.  It wasn't immediately clear whether new tests that pick up both 
HIV-1 and HIV-2 would likewise identify SIV-tainted blood, but a 
knowledgeable scientists said that they probably would do so.

Several scientists said the report about two people testing positive for 
SIV adds credence to the theory that AIDS may have entered the human 
population as an accidental results of a live oral polio vaccine made 
using the kidneys of a monkey that carried SIV or HIV.

"Any report that people can be infected by SIV tends to support the 
theory," said Dr. Gerasmos Lecatsas, chair of the department of virology 
at the Medical University of Southern Africa in Pretoria, South Africa.  
"It's added circumstantial evidence."

Dr. Cecil Fox, a longtime AIDS researcher, said from his office in 
suburban Washington, D.C., that the NIH memo "just confirms the 
likelihood that HIV had a simian (monkey) origin and, second, that the 
transmission to humans could have occurred from hunters (who cut 
themselves while skinning monkeys), lab workers, or SIV contamination of 
polio vaccines."

Gerald Meyers of Los Alamos National Laboratory, the federal 
government's chief expert in the science of tracing the evolution of 
HIV, and several colleagues have written in an AIDS research journal 
that it is possible "human immunodeficiency virus (HIVs) may simply be 
simian immunodeficiency viruses (SIVs) residing in and adapting to a 
human host."

They added: "There is no clear answer to this question at this time; 
however, the notion if less far-fetched in 1992 than it was merely a few 
years ago..."

The NIH memo said that one of the lab workers who tested positive for 
the monkey virus did so "as the result of a needle stick" and the other 
was exposed to specimens from a macaque infected with SIV.  Neither 
person was identified and it was not said whether they worked for the 
federal government, primate centers, or private employers like drug 
companies.  

According to the memo, the second person who tested positive for SIV was 
not wearing gloves when ho or she came into contact with the virus.  The 
worker also was experiencing "active dermatitis," a skin disease.

In the first person to test positive, the level of antibodies to SIV has 
declined "over a two year period," the memo said.  That appears to 
suggest an absence or reduction in infection, according to a source at 
the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta who declined to be 
quoted by name.

Similarly, Dr. James L. Blanchard, who heads the department of 
veterinary sciences at Tulane Regional Primate Center in Covington, La., 
says that six months ago the CDC discussed the first case.  At that 
time, it said there was no evidence the virus was reproducing itself and 
that there was "no indication of infection."

But the second individual continues to test positive with increasing 
antibody levels, "suggesting persistent infection," Healy wrote.  She 
said the first, more reassuring case, has been reported to the British 
medical journal Lancet by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).  That 
account "will be published in the next few weeks."  However, there was 
no indication that the more disturbing case has been reported to any 
medical journal.

The CDC, which first made NIH aware of the two cases, did not respond to 
telephone inquiries made to its press office Friday.  Likewise, NIH did 
not respond to requests for interviews with its administrators.

"We have the matter under consideration and wore working with experts to 
consider appropriate steps," NIH spokesman Dan Ralbovsky said, reading a 
prepared statement in its entirety.  "No one is ill," the statement 
concluded.

"All we have to do is wait another five or 10 years to find out if 
people who test positive for the virus actually get sick," said an NIH 
researcher who works with monkey blood.

The Healy memo says the government suspects that infection with SIV, 
which is a member of the same lentivirus subfamily of retroviruses as 
the human immunodeficiency virus linked to AIDS, is "an uncommon even in 
humans."

Previously some scientists have suggested that infection of people with 
SIV was all but impossible.  "The conventional wisdom is it's not 
supposed to happen," noted Stacy Maloney, spokesman for the Southwestern 
Foundation for Biomedical Research in San Antonio.

Despite the previous medical dogma that SIV could not infect human 
beings, officials at several primate centers said Friday that they were 
not surprised by the news.

Blanchard of the Tulane center, for instance, said "there's always been 
that possibility."  He noted that scientists earlier had shown that SIV 
could be grown in human cells in the laboratory.

"It's always been a subject of concern," said Dr. Douglas M. Bowden, 
director of the Regional Primate Center at the University of Washington 
in Seattle, who estimated that out of about 4,000 monkeys at the center 
300 to 350 are infected with SIV.

He said his primate center has always taken precautions "as if SIV was a 
pathogen (cause of disease) for humans."  The two people who tested 
positive for SIV, he said, "obviously weren't following procedures" that 
call for wearing gloves and other protective clothing when handling SIV-
infected monkeys and monkey blood products.

SIV was first discovered in the 1980s and was found to be carried 
silently by African green monkeys, the natural hosts, which do not get 
sick from the virus.  However, when other monkey species, such as rhesus 
macaques, are exposed to SIV, some become ill with an AIDS-like disease 
and die.  

Some researchers studying SIV have found that when the virus was passed 
from one susceptible monkey to the next, it became more virulent.  
Finally, after many such passages from monkey to monkey, the virus was 
re-introduced to the original host--the one that at first showed no 
symptoms--with lethal effect.

Beginning in the early 1960s, African green monkeys became the preferred 
species whose kidneys were harvested to make primary monkey kidney 
culture to grow live oral polio vaccine.  They remain so today in the 
United States.

The sole make of live oral polio vaccines in the United States, Lederle 
Laboratories, a subsidiary of American Cyanamid, has told The Post it 
currently tests for SIV and discards any pre-vaccine material tainted 
with SIV.

But critics including lawyer Walter Kyle have questioned whether SIV was 
present in polio vaccines prior to the 1980s, when no test existed to 
identify  and eliminate it.  Last March Kyle wrote an article in the 
Lancet suggesting that a novel treatment for herpes--double doses twice 
as often as indicated for polio immunization--might have spawned AIDS 
among homosexuals who received the herpes treatment in New York and 
California.  The unorthodox treatment was introduced in the mid-1970s 
and is now discouraged as ineffective.
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