LETTERS TO THE EDITORS
The Origins of AIDS?
To the Editors:
In "The Puzzling Origins of Aids" (November-December), Jim
Moore provides a commendably fair analysis. However, he
neglects important evidence that I have reported since initial
publication of The River in 1999. For example, the CHAT
vaccine lot used in the 1958 trial of Koprowski's vaccines,
involving 215,504 persons in the Ruzizi Valley (bordering the then
Belgian Congo) was three times stronger when administered in Africa
than when prepared at Philadelphia's Wistar Institute. As live
polio vaccines lose titre (concentration) during storage and
transportation, the only conceivable explanation is that the
researchers were passaging vaccine in locally available primate
tissue cultures after arrival to boost quantity and
titre—common practice at the time (according to 2003,
Atti dei Convegni Lincei 187: 27-230). Belgians
and Congolese who worked at the Stanleyville Medical Laboratory (the
headquarters for the CHAT trials in Africa) attest that chimpanzee
tissue cultures were frequently prepared there, and given to the
head of virology, who was handling the polio vaccines.
Geneticists M.H. Schierup and R. Forsberg (2003, Atti dei
Convegni Lincei 187: 231-245), present strong evidence
indicating that recombination occurred early in the evolutionary
history of HIV-1. This could have happened when two chimpanzee SIVs
recombined in culture during CHAT preparation in chimp cells in
Stanleyville. Schierup concludes that this alone could have
engendered the global diversity of HIV-1 seen today.
Such a scenario would invalidate both the major arguments against
OPV—the phylogenetic dating argument (that HIV-1 dates from
1931) and the "wrong subspecies" argument. The OPV theory
can also account for the recent AIDS outbreaks caused by HIV-2 and
the minor strains of HIV-1. Experimental polio vaccines (both
oral and injected) prepared in African primate tissues were tested
in French Equatorial Africa and French West Africa in the latter
half of the 1950s. As detailed in the postscript to The
River (2000 paperback version), these are the very places where
the minor AIDS outbreaks occurred, and among the primates then being
used by the French were chimpanzees and sooty mangabeys, the natural
hosts to the immediate ancestors of HIV-1 and HIV-2.
Edward Hooper
Bridgwater, U.K.
Dr. Moore responds:
I thank Ed Hooper for his kind words about fairness; the topic is a
minefield and I am pleased to have made it across (so far). I
indeed neglected much "evidence" on every side of each theory,
as well as entire theories. The problem is that the term evidence covers
everything from physical blood samples to things that "could have
happened" or that rely on testimonial juxtapositions: Hooper
reports that people say that something was done with chimpanzee tissue
cultures, and one of the people involved was (also?) involved with OPV
work. The tenuous nature of such evidence greatly weakens the OPV
scenario, and has been taken by some as "proof" that the
theory is dead. While I believe the OPV theory is highly unlikely
to be correct, that final judgment is premature. And there remains
the still open question of exactly what was being done with the hundreds
of chimpanzees at Camp Lindi.