[NVIC E-news] Mutated Live Vaccine Polioviruses Pollute Water, Paralyze

by Barbara Loe Fisher

In yet another stunning example of arrogant and immoral behavior, doctors
at the World Health Organization (WHO) and Centers for Disease Control
(CDC) admitted last week that they deliberately did not tell "the public"
that neurovirulent mutated vaccine strain live polio viruses are polluting
world water supplies and are responsible for polio outbreaks among children
in Nigeria and other countries. Dr. David Heymann, a leader in WHO's polio
eradication effort, reportedly explained that WHO "considered the
[Nigerian] outbreak to be a problem for scientists and not something that
would change global vaccination practices" so WHO didn't share the
information with the public until now.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ ap/20071005/ap_on_he_me/nigeria_polio_paradox

There is a lot of information that WHO and CDC officials have not shared
with the public about what forcing worldwide use of a live oral polio for
40 years has done. The Sabin live polio vaccine - which is the public
health community's main claim to fame and fortune in the 20th century - may
not only have unleashed the most feared autoimmune disorder to plague man
in two centuries
( http://www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n07/hoop01_.html ) as well as caused increases
in brain, bone and lung cancers (
http://jnci.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/jnci% 3b94/3/229-a.pdf)
but also has created mutant paralytic viruses that could cripple many more
humans than would have been crippled if the live virus polio vaccine had
never been used at all.

The US abandoned the Sabin live polio vaccine in 1999 and switched to the
inactivated Salk vaccine that cannot cause vaccine strain polio. So why are
billions of dollars being spent to pour the risky live virus polio vaccine
into the mouths of the poorest babies in the most underprivileged countries
in the world where sanitation and water supplies are already compromised?

The worst part of this deception is that WHO and CDC spin doctors are
trying to convince parents in Africa, India and elsewhere that it is the
"unvaccinated" who are causing vaccine strain polio outbreaks even though
many of these children are getting 9 or 10 polio vaccinations
http://vaccineawakening.blogspot.c om/search?q=India%2C+polio+vaccine
Although public health officials are trying to blame polio outbreaks on the
'unvaccinated," the medical literature documents that assertion to be false.

Here is just a sampling of articles from the medical literature about
mutated vaccine strain polio viruses causing paralytic disease in
vaccinated populations:

1) In 1999, Paul Fine took information from a WHO document and published an
article in the American Journal of Epidemiology on the transmissability and
persistence of oral polio viruses. He concluded that "the findings indicate
that OPV viruses could persist under various plausible circumstances" after
mass vaccination with live OPV around the world is stopped.
(http://pt.wkhealth.com/pt/re/ajep/abstract.00000429- 199911150-
00001.htm;jsessionid=HKgZjMMTjTzWZ9tW5wGr0wTh
FLHL2JPG2DxRvhKgywb2NL11TyvJ!-656639706! 181195629!8091!-1)

(2) In 2000, Israeli and CDC researchers reported in the Journal of
Clinical Microbiology that a "highly evolved derivative of the Type 2 oral
poliovaccine strain" was isolated from sewage in Israel. They concluded
that "the presence in the environment of a highly evolved, neurovirulent
OPV- derived poliovirus in the absence of polio cases has important
implications for strategies for the cessation of immunization with OPV
following global polio eradication."
(http://jcm.asm.org/cgi/content/abstract/38/10/3729)

(3) In 2002, Japanese researchers reported in the Journal of General
Virology on a 1993-1995 survey of poliovirus in river and sewage water.
They concluded that "The prevalence of virulent type vaccine derived
polioviruses (VDPV's) in river and sewage water suggested that the oral
poliovaccine itself had led to wide environmental pollution in nature."
(http://vir.sgmjournals.org/cgi/content/asbtract/83 /5/1107)

(4) In 2002, Russian and FDA researchers reported in the Journal of
Virology on the "Long Term Circulation of Vaccine-Derived Poliovirus That
Causes Paralytic Disease" after finding a highly evolved derivative of the
Sabin vaccine strain isolated in a case of paralytic poliomyelitis from a
healthy 7 month old baby "in an apparently adequately immunized
population." When the researchers analyzed the genome of the isolate, they
found it was a double (type1-type2) vaccine-derived recombinant and that
the number of mutations suggested "both had diverged from their vaccine
predecessors." They concluded that "The reported data indicate that
vaccine-derived viruses may make their way through narrow breaches and
evolve into transmissible pathogens even in adequately immunized
populations." (http: //jvi.asm.org/cgi/content/full/76/13/6791)

(5) In 2003, Russian and FDA researchers published in the Proceedings of
the National Academy of Sciences a "Microarray analysis of evolution of RNA
viruses: Evidence of circulation of virulent highly divergent
vaccine-derived polioviruses." They said "We identified a type-3 VDPV
(vaccine derived polio virus) isolated from a healthy person and missed by
conventional methods of screening. The mutational profile of the polio
strain was consistent with less than 1 year circulation in human population
and was highly virulent in transgenic mice, confirming the ability of VDPV
to persist in communities despite high levels of immunity."
(http://www/pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/100/16/9 398)

(6) In 2005, Russian and FDA researchers published an article in Journal of
Virology in which they reported on results of a study of vaccine-derived
isolates from "an immunocompromised poliomyelitis patient, the contacts,
and the local sewage." They acknowledged that "The increased neurovirulence
of vaccine derivatives has been known since the beginning of OPV use, but
their ability to establish circulation in communities has been recognized
only recently during the latest stages of the polio eradication campaign."
They go on to discuss the new recombinant type 2/type1 genome that has
developed as a result of mass use of live polio vaccine as well as "another
mutation in the VP3 protein" that may facilitate "virus spread in immunized
populations." Their conclusion:

"The patterns and rates of the accumulation of synonymous mutations in
isolates collected from the patient over the extended period of [vaccine
strain poliovirus] excretion suggest either a substantially nonuniform rate
of mutagenesis throughout the genome, or, more likely, the strains may have
been intratypic recombinants between coevolving derivatives with different
degrees of divergence from the vaccine parent. This study provides insight
into the early stages of the establishment of circulation by runaway
vaccine strains." ( http://jvi.asm.org/cgi/content/abstract/79/2/1062)

For too long, vaccine-wielding doctors employed by the U.S. government and
worldwide medical organizations, like the WHO, have joined with
pharmaceutical companies and conned politicians and populations around the
world into accepting forced use of vaccines that have not been properly
tested and regulated. When doctors and scientists think they are entitled
to experiment on people and keep those medical experiments secret, it is no
wonder that iatragenic diseases like cancers, AIDS and mutated vaccine
strain viral diseases soon follow.

It is time to take the holy robes off of doctors and scientists who are
tinkering with the biological integrity of the human race and the
ecological balance on earth. The parents in Africa and India, who are
fleeing from the vaccine-wielding doctors hunting their children down, are
not ignorant or crazy. They are exercising common sense.

FOR 25 YEARS, THE NATIONAL VACCINE INFORMATION CENTER HAS BEEN TELLING THE
TRUTH ABOUT VACCINE RISKS AND FIGHTING FOR YOUR FREEDOM TO MAKE INFORMED,
VOLUNTARY VACCINATION CHOICES. PLEASE TAKE A MOMENT TO CONSIDER HOW
IMPORTANT THIS VOICE FOR TRUTH AND FREEDOM IS FOR YOU, YOUR FAMILY AND
FUTURE GENERATIONS.

PLEASE BECOME A SUPPORTER OF NVIC AND GIVE A GENEROUS TAX DEDUCTIBLE
DONATION AT https://www.nvic.org/makingcashdonations.htm


_______________________________________

"A polio outbreak in Nigeria was caused by the vaccine designed to stop it,
international health officials say, leaving at least 69 children
paralyzed.....The CDC and the World Health Organization announced the cause
of the polio outbreak last week, even though they knew about it last
year.....The oral polio vaccine contains a weakened version of polio
virus....In rare instances, as the virus passes through unimmunized
children, it can mutate into a form that is dangerous enough to spark new
outbreaks. In 2001, officials reported that 22 children were paralyzed from
polio in the Dominican Republic and Haiti in this way. Subsequent
vaccine-caused polio outbreaks have occurred in the Philippines,
Madagascar, China and Indonesia.....CDC's Kew added: "The people who are
against immunization may seize on anything that could strengthen their
position, even if it's scientifically untenable."....WHO said that changing
the vaccination strategy is unnecessary. "It would be nice if we had a more
stable oral polio vaccine, but that's not the way it is today," Heymann
said. "We will continue working the way we have been working because we
don't want children to be paralyzed anywhere." - Maria Cheng, Associated
Press (October 5, 2007)
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ ap/20071005/ap_on_he_me/nigeria_polio_paradox

"Between 1961 and 1978, Lederle, a leading vaccine manufacturer, controlled
between 70 to 80 percent of the oral polio vaccine market. Its product was
known as "Orimune". From 1978 until 2000 (the year the United States
prohibited the sale of the oral polio vaccine), that company had 100% of
the American market for oral polio vaccine. It has claimed that it
distributed over 650 million doses in the United States alone since its
licensure. At the conference of the United States of America, Department of
Health & Human Services, held on Monday, January 29-30, 1997 entitled
CBER-NCI-NICHD-NIP-NVPO SIMIAN VIRUS 40 (SV40): A POSSIBLE HUMAN
POLYOMAVIRUS WORKSHOP, representatives of Lederle assured the assembly that
all oral polio vaccine in the United States manufactured by that company
was SV40 free and that it had prepared the vaccine in green monkey kidney
cells that do not harbor the SV40 virus. Internal Documents obtained by
SV40 Cancer.com tell a different story." - SV40Cancer.com
(http://www.sv40cancer.com/knew.asp">htt p:// ww w.sv40cancer.com/knew.asp)

"Four years ago I wrote The River, a book in which I argued for a new
theory of how the Aids pandemic began. The book proved very controversial,
and provoked what I would consider a defensive response from many in the
scientific community, who damned the theory on insubstantial grounds. I am
returning to this subject now because there is new evidence, both
historical and scientific, to demonstrate that the theory was buried
prematurely. After 27 million deaths and the infection of more than 66
million people with HIV, there are now strong indications that human hands
- in particular, those of the doctor and the scientist - started the AIDS
pandemic. This is not the theory of origin favoured by most in the medical
establishment: the familiar 'cut hunter' or natural transfer theory
proposes that a single hunter or bushmeat seller became infected with
simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) while skinning or butchering a chimp,
and that the pandemic started from that one infection. The theory of origin
that I supported in The River is the OPV (oral polio vaccine) theory, and
it requires a little background. In the 1950s, OPVs were prepared in
primate cells, as most still are today. As a result, each OPV contained not
only weakened poliovirus, but also whichever monkey viruses happened to be
present in the cell substrate......" - Edward Hooper, London Review of
Books (April 3, 2003)
http://www.l rb.co.uk/v25/n07/hoop01_.html



Officials say drug caused Nigeria polio

Associated Press
October 5, 2007

by Maria Cheng

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/05/AR2007100501
193.html

A polio outbreak in Nigeria was caused by the vaccine designed to stop it,
international health officials say, leaving at least 69 children paralyzed.

It is a frightening paradox in a part of the world that already distrusts
western vaccines, making it even tougher to stamp out age-old diseases.

The outbreak was caused by the live polio virus that is used in vaccines
given orally - the preferred method in developing countries because it is
cheaper and doesn't require medical training to dispense.

"This vaccine is the most effective tool we have against the virus, but
it's like fighting fire with fire," said Olen Kew, a virologist at the U.S.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The CDC and the World Health Organization announced the cause of the polio
outbreak last week, even though they knew about it last year.

Outbreaks caused by the oral vaccine's live virus have happened before. But
the continuing Nigerian outbreak is the biggest ever caused by the vaccine.
It also follows a nearly yearlong boycott of the vaccine in Africa's most
populous country because of unfounded fears the vaccine was a Western plot
to sterilize Muslims.

Officials now worry that the latest vaccine-caused Nigerian outbreak could
trigger another vaccine scare.

Experts say such outbreaks only happen when too few children are
vaccinated. In northern Nigeria, only about 39 percent of children are
fully protected against polio.

The oral polio vaccine contains a weakened version of polio virus. Children
who have been vaccinated excrete the virus, and in unsanitary conditions it
can end up in the water supply, spreading to unvaccinated children.

In rare instances, as the virus passes through unimmunized children, it can
mutate into a form that is dangerous enough to spark new outbreaks.

In 2001, officials reported that 22 children were paralyzed from polio in
the Dominican Republic and Haiti in this way. Subsequent vaccine-caused
polio outbreaks have occurred in the Philippines, Madagascar, China and
Indonesia.

In the West, the polio vaccine is given as a shot and uses an inactivated
virus, but that method is more expensive and requires training.

In Nigeria, the outbreak comes "in the wake of all the other problems
they've had in," said Dr. Donald A. Henderson, who led WHO's smallpox
eradication campaign in the 1970s.

In 2003, politicians in northern Nigeria canceled vaccination campaigns for
nearly a year, claiming the vaccine was a Western plot to sterilize
Muslims. That led to an explosion of polio, and the virus jumped to about
two dozen countries.

Now, health officials' decision to keep quiet about the cause of the
outbreak for so long may look suspicious.

Dr. David Heymann, WHO's top polio official, said that because the
organization considered the outbreak to be a problem for scientists and not
something that would change global vaccination practices, they thought it
was unnecessary to immediately share publicly.

CDC's Kew added: "The people who are against immunization may seize on
anything that could strengthen their position, even if it's scientifically
untenable."

Rumors are still rife among Nigerians that the vaccine is unsafe, and
several religious leaders continue to lecture on its dangers. Another mass
vaccine boycott could lead to further polio spread, derailing long-standing
eradication efforts for good.

Nigerian health officials contacted by The Associated Press declined to
comment on the situation.

"Convincing the Nigerians to take even more of this vaccine will be a tough
sell," said Dr. Samuel Katz, an infectious diseases specialist at Duke
University and co-inventor of the measles vaccine.

More than 10 billion polio doses have been given to children worldwide, and
the vaccine has been credited with cutting polio incidence by more than 99
percent since 1988. Far more children are paralyzed by the wild polio virus
than the virus spread by the oral vaccine. But no vaccine is risk-free.

WHO said that changing the vaccination strategy is unnecessary. "It would
be nice if we had a more stable oral polio vaccine, but that's not the way
it is today," Heymann said. "We will continue working the way we have been
working because we don't want children to be paralyzed anywhere."




Re: Debate on the Link Between SV40 and Human Cancer Continues

Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Vol.94, No. 3, February 6, 2002

http://jnci.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/jnci%3b94/3/229-a.pdf

The news article by Nancy J. Nelson (1) repeats the current scientific
dogma that simian virus 40 (SV40) was removed from all oral polio vaccine
sold and administered in the United States. In a recent article (2),
however, I have challenged this accepted "fact" based on legal documents
and the absence of test results from at least one of the principal vaccine
manufacturers, Lederle. As noted in that article, internal Lederle
documents indicate that the company has not been able to document that it
tested all vaccine seeds to confirm the absence of SV40 contamination.
Therefore, statements in Nelson's article, such as "people most likely to
have received contaminated vaccines were born from 1941 through 1961" are
inaccurate and potentially misleading.

Dr. Strickler's statement that "mesotheliomas are developing in people who
are too old to be vaccinated and brain tumors (are developing] in children
that are too young to have been vaccinated" may be explained by the
presence of SV40 in the oral polio vaccine and the fact that oral polio
vaccine can spread from the recipient to those who come in contact with the
excretions (oral and fecal) of the recipient within a defined period of
time (3). There has been no investigation of whether SV40 can be
transmitted from individuals vaccinated with the live oral polio vaccine to
unvaccinated individuals because everyone has assumed that SV40 was never
in that product from the inception of its being sold in the United States.

Every scientist who is attempting to determine the role of SV40 as a cause
of cancer in humans and every news reporter who is interested in this issue
should demand all of the records of both the government and the vaccine
manufacturer so that there can be a full scientific and independent
investigation as to whether there was full compliance with the removal of
SV40 from all oral polio vaccine used in the United States from 1962 until
2000. Oral polio vaccine is no longer sold in the United States, and only
enhanced inactivated vaccine is now allowed for routine immunization.

REFERENCES

(1) Nelson NJ. Debate on the link between SV40 and human cancer continues.
J Natl Cancer Inst 2001; 93:1284-6.
(2) Kops SP. Oral polio vaccine and human cancer: a reassessment of SV40 as
a contaminant based upon legal documents. Anticancer Res 2000; 20:475-9.
(3) Henderson DA, Witte JJ, Morris L, Langmuir AD. Paralytic disease
associated with oral polio vaccines. JAMA 1964; 190-:41-8.

NOTES:

Correspondence to: Stanley Kops, Esq. (email: stankops@aol.com)



Aids and the Polio Vaccine
Edward Hooper finds new evidence

London Review of Books
April 3, 2003

www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n07/print/hoop01_.html

Four years ago I wrote The River, a book in which I argued for a new theory
of how the Aids pandemic began. The book proved very controversial, and
provoked what I would consider a defensive response from many in the
scientific community, who damned the theory on insubstantial grounds. I am
returning to this subject now because there is new evidence, both
historical and scientific, to demonstrate that the theory was buried
prematurely.

After 27 million deaths and the infection of more than 66 million people
with HIV, there are now strong indications that human hands - in
particular, those of the doctor and the scientist - started the Aids
pandemic. This is not the theory of origin favoured by most in the medical
establishment: the familiar 'cut hunter' or natural transfer theory
proposes that a single hunter or bushmeat seller became infected with
simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) while skinning or butchering a chimp,
and that the pandemic started from that one infection.

The theory of origin that I supported in The River is the OPV (oral polio
vaccine) theory, and it requires a little background. In the 1950s, OPVs
were prepared in primate cells, as most still are today. As a result, each
OPV contained not only weakened poliovirus, but also whichever monkey
viruses happened to be present in the cell substrate. One such virus was
SV-40 (the 40th simian virus to be discovered), which was found in 1960 to
cause tumours in hamsters. By then, tens of millions of people around the
world had been given SV- 40-contaminated polio vaccines, and over the next
two years the producers switched from using Asian monkeys, which are
susceptible to infection with SV- 40, to African monkeys, which are not.
Forty years on, it is recognised that exposure to SV-40 leads to a slightly
heightened risk of contracting certain cancers such as mesothelioma.

But the OPV theory relates to a different polio vaccine. It proposes that
an experimental polio vaccine called CHAT, developed at the Wistar
Institute in Philadelphia, initiated the Aids pandemic by introducing
simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) from the common chimpanzee into some of
the million Africans who were given the vaccine between 1957 and 1960.
Chimpanzee SIV is now widely recognised as the direct ancestor of the
strain of HIV (HIV-1 Group M) that has caused approximately 99 per cent of
infections to date. In Africa, CHAT vaccine was administered only in
Belgian-ruled territories: the Belgian Congo (now the Democratic Republic
of Congo) and the former UN trusteeship of Ruanda-Urundi (now Rwanda and
Burundi). These are also the countries that represent the epicentre of
Group M-related Aids. The Laboratoire Médical de Stanleyville (LMS), which
tested CHAT vaccine for safety and co-ordinated the early African
vaccinations, was situated just a few miles from a chimpanzee colony, Lindi
camp, which operated between 1956 and 1960. During those years, more than
five hundred chimps and pygmy chimps (bonobos) were sacrificed there,
mostly in the course of the polio research.

It has sometimes been claimed that people do not become HIV-infected by the
oral route. This is demonstrably wrong: gay men have become infected after
having only oral sex, and there are several recorded instances in which
babies of HIV-negative mothers have been infected through being breast-fed
by HIV-positive wet nurses. All mucosal cells, including those of the mouth
and throat, represent potential portals of entry for HIVs and SIVs, and the
likelihood of infection increases when there are oral lesions, such as
those caused by teething or mouth ulcers. The dendritic cells around the
tonsils are also significant target cells for HIV, and much of the CHAT
administered in Africa, in contrast to OPVs given elsewhere, was delivered
by a squirt with a syringe to the back of the throat.

By September 2000, in the run-up to a Royal Society conference on the
origin of HIV and Aids, half a dozen samples of CHAT vaccine selected from
the freezers at the Wistar Institute had been independently tested in three
separate labs. No trace of HIV, SIV or chimpanzee DNA was found. Rather
surprisingly, given that none of the samples selected had been prepared
specifically for the African trials, the results were widely taken by
medical journals, and by the press at large, as concrete proof against the
OPV theory. In April 2001, brief reports by the labs that had tested the
CHAT samples were published in Nature and Science, and both journals made a
big splash of the findings in editorials and commentaries. Robin Weiss's
piece in Nature was headed 'Polio vaccines exonerated', as if the safety of
all such vaccines were in question, and ended with the claim that 'some
beautiful facts have destroyed an ugly theory.'

Weiss wrongly stated that the samples had 'included the OPV batch
(designated CHAT 13) used in Leopoldville', confusing the terms 'pool' and
'batch'. To explain the importance of his error requires a brief digression
into how polio vaccines are made. Passaging (growing) a virus such as
poliovirus in different substrates or tissue cultures (sheets of animal
cells grown in vitro, in the laboratory) alters the pathogenicity of the
virus. What polio vaccine-makers are looking for is a weakened, or
attenuated version that will produce protective antibodies in humans, but
not the disease itself. A 'pool' of polio vaccine describes material
produced at a specific level of attenuation - 'Pool 9', for instance, might
indicate a poliovirus that has been attenuated by being passaged 28 times
through chick embryo tissue culture, and eight times through monkey kidney
tissue culture. (In most American and European virology labs in the 1950s,
this meant kidney cells from macaques, a species of monkey found in India
and the Philippines; it was the accepted final substrate for most polio
vaccines.)

By contrast, a specific 'batch' of Pool 9 would describe a quantity of
vaccine that had been prepared from that pool on a specific date in a
specific lab: in other words, in a single production run. In practice,
batches are prepared by taking a small quantity of the vaccine pool (or a
batch made from that pool), and amplifying it by a final passage in monkey
kidney tissue culture. The different numbered pools of CHAT vaccine had all
been made at the Wistar Institute, or later at pharmaceutical houses,
mainly in the USA and Belgium. The crucial factor, however, is where and
how the individual batches were made. Some of these batches, I have now
found, were prepared in labs far from the US and Belgium, and in substrates
derived from different species of primate.

Just a few days before the articles appeared in Nature and Science, some
colleagues and I had made a remarkable discovery in Kisangani (formerly
Stanleyville). We tracked down and talked to three former lab technicians
who had worked at LMS in the late 1950s. Just five minutes into his
interview, one of the virology technicians, Jacques Kanyama, revealed that
batches of CHAT vaccine had been prepared locally in Stanleyville. This was
the detail I had missed in The River. Until now, all the Belgian and
American witnesses who had worked at LMS, or who had been involved with
CHAT, had insisted that the vaccine had not, indeed could not, have been
made locally. They didn't have the equipment, they said; they couldn't
possibly have produced a vaccine at a primitive lab like that.

But Kanyama explained that he had started working in Paul Osterrieth's
virology department at LMS on 12 February 1958, and that Osterrieth had
already been making polio vaccine before his arrival. He described how
Osterrieth would bring the vaccine from his sterile room, after which the
assistants would divide it into phials. Each time a new order came in,
Osterrieth made fresh polio vaccine. Sometimes the technicians also helped
with immunisations, and Kanyama recalled one particular episode when they
took the vaccine across the river to Lukusa military camp to vaccinate the
soldiers and their families, giving each person a few drops by mouth. This
not only established a chain of custody, but also identified the vaccine as
CHAT, the only vaccine then given by mouth in the Congo.

It was now essential to discover which primate tissue cultures the
Stanleyville doctors had used to prepare the vaccine. Philippe Elebe worked
from April 1956 as a technician in the microbiology department (where
Osterrieth had worked until the virology section opened in 1957). He told
us that they had indeed been producing tissue culture, and that he had been
in charge of culture media - the balanced salt solutions, sera and
antibiotics that are used to keep cultures alive and biologically 'sterile'
(free from known pathogens). We asked which primate had been used to make
the tissue cultures, and Elebe's reply was prompt: 'Surtout les chimpanzés.'

After returning from Africa, I did further research. It transpired that
there were no rules in the 1950s about which primate cells to use for
growing polio vaccines: any species could be used provided it made good
cultures. Chimp kidneys made 'very good' cultures, with 'very good'
sensitivity to poliovirus. And it was routine practice for oral polio
vaccine to be amplified locally, in labs around the world. Some
virologists, including Albert Sabin, whose sugar lump OPV was adopted for
use the world over, acknowledged this fact in their publications. Others,
including makers of CHAT vaccine, did not.

However, the papers written about vaccinations in Poland in 1959-60 by
collaborators of the Wistar Institute reveal that the titre (concentration)
of the CHAT vaccine had risen tenfold between the time of its arrival at
the virology department of the State Institute of Hygiene in Warsaw and the
moment, a few weeks later, when the vaccine was diluted and distributed to
smaller labs around the country. Because vaccine titre decreases with time
and temperature change, the only possible explanation was that the titre
had been boosted by further passage in primate cells in Warsaw prior to
dilution. The primates used by the Polish scientists were the standard
Asian macaques, which are not naturally infected with SIV. This indicates
why, of the seven million children given CHAT in Poland, and the million
elsewhere in Europe, none became HIV-infected as a result.

For trials in Africa (then at least two days from the US by plane), the
standard practice was to fly a small bottle of the vaccine, packed in an
ice-box, to the destination lab, where it was amplified in whichever
primate cells were locally available. This meant that less vaccine had to
be transported, and that vaccine quantity and titre could be boosted on
arrival. The higher the titre, the more it could be diluted and the more
people could be vaccinated. By the second half of the 1950s, virologists in
South Africa were using African green monkey cells to amplify the Sabin
vaccines, while their colleagues in French West Africa and French
Equatorial Africa were apparently using cells from baboons (and perhaps
other species, too) to amplify the Pasteur Institute vaccines of Pierre
Lepine. In Stanleyville, they had the Lindi chimpanzees.

This new information does not prove that CHAT vaccine started Aids, but it
does significantly strengthen the OPV hypothesis. Over the last three
years, various 'disproofs' have been put forward, but none stands up to
scrutiny. One claim involved an attempt to calculate whether a potential
contaminating virus such as chimp SIV could have survived the
vaccine-making process, and concluded that the chances were trillions to
one against. This is wrong. The tissue cultures used in Stanleyville, at
least until mid-1958, were clearly of a primitive type that would have
provided ideal substrates not just for attenuated polioviruses, but also
for SIVs. At least some of these cultures also employed chimpanzee sera to
nourish the cells, which means there was substantial potential for
recombination (the exchange of fragments of DNA) between different SIV
strains in vitro.
It has also been claimed, for instance by a group of researchers led by
Beatrice Hahn, Bette Korber and Paul Sharp, that Aids could not have
started in the 1950s, because their calculations reveal that the first HIV
infection (the so-called 'Eve virus') must have existed in the 1940s or
1930s. However, in Science last July, Jon Cohen, the magazine's leading
Aids correspondent, wrote about a 'beautiful study' of rampant
recombination in the spleen of an HIV- infected patient, observing that the
research raised 'serious questions about phylogeny trees that attempt to
date the origin of HIV, all of which discard suspected recombinants to make
the data interpretable'.

Cohen was only stating what other scientists had been murmuring for some
time: that the phylogenetic model used by Hahn, Sharp and Korber to date
the epidemic appears inherently flawed, in that it allows for evolution
through mutation, but not through recombination, which is now revealed as a
major factor in the development of immunodeficiency viruses. Another
geneticist, Mikkel Schierup, has pointed out that all it would have
required to generate the diversity of HIV-1 variants seen in the world
today would be two different chimp SIVs which somehow recombined in humans.
Such an event could have happened in vivo (for instance in human vaccinees)
or in vitro (for instance in polio vaccines cultured in chimp cells and
later fed to humans).

The Hahn group has also insisted that the closest ancestor of HIV-1 is the
SIV found in chimpanzees from west central Africa, and that the chimp SIVs
from the Democratic Republic of Congo and central Africa are more distantly
related. I believe this is a dangerous claim, and not only because recent
mitochondrial DNA analysis suggests that the chimps from these two regions
should be redesignated as a single subspecies. Even now, there are only
four available SIV sequences from the west central African chimps, and just
two from the central African chimps. The latter are slightly less closely
related to HIV-1, but crucially they differ massively from each other,
which emphasises the urgent need for extensive SIV testing right across the
chimpanzee range. The five hundred common chimps and eighty bonobos that
were housed at Lindi were collected from a vast area - 100,000 square miles
of the Congolese rain forest - and we know that at least one chimp (which
survived at Lindi for more than two years) came from the Mbandaka area, so
may well have been one of Hahn's west central African chimps. Because cages
and play- cages were shared, just one such SIV-infected chimp might have
caused widespread SIV infection throughout the colony. So even if Hahn is
right, it doesn't disprove the OPV theory.

Perhaps the most important area of this debate, however, relates to the
early epidemiology of Aids. We know that CHAT vaccine was administered in
at least 27 different places, all in the Democratic Republic of Congo,
Rwanda and Burundi. I have found that 68 per cent of all the earliest Aids
cases in Africa (and therefore, with minor exceptions, the world), and 76
per cent of all the earliest HIV infections in the continent, come from the
very same towns and villages where CHAT was administered between 1957 and
1960. Recently, a software programme has been devised to analyse five
competing theories for the emergence of Aids in Africa - and found that
only the OPV scenario achieved a good fit.

The most interesting argument against OPV has been put forward by two
American scientists, Preston Marx and Ernest Drucker. They take the cut
hunter/natural transfer scenario (which, theoretically, might have occurred
at any point during the last few million years, since chimps and humans
became separate species), and provide it with a plausible timeframe. They
do this by proposing an amplification factor: the arrival in Africa of
disposable needles, which were nonetheless reused. Needle deliveries to
Africa experienced an exponential rise in the 1950s.

This is a theory not of iatrogenic origin, but of iatrogenic spread. It is
the only version of the 'cut hunter' theory that seems at all credible;
otherwise, supporters of the theory have to rely on urbanisation as the
factor that allowed a primate virus that had recently passed to humans
suddenly to explode. In fact, this explosion would have to have happened
not just once, but four times almost simultaneously, since in addition to
the pandemic strain, three other HIVs have emerged and become established
in Africa in the last fifty to seventy years, infecting between a few
hundred thousand and a few dozen persons in each case. These minor
outbreaks fit rather well with the OPV theory, for it is known that
experimental French-made polio vaccines were tested in the 1950s in both
French Equatorial Africa and French West Africa - the epicentres of the
three minor HIV outbreaks. Among the primates the French were using for
their research were chimps and sooty mangabeys, the SIVs of which are the
closest relatives to the HIV strains associated with the outbreaks.

The Marx/Drucker theory has been embraced by the scientific establishment,
even though the medical profession plays a key role in it. This may be
because the theory is non-specific, so that no individual physicians or
institutions can be held responsible. And there is an unspoken subtext:
that the physicians in question were probably not Western ones. However,
the reuse of unsterilised needles did not happen only in the Belgian Congo,
so this theory doesn't explain the strong correlation between early
HIV/Aids and the 27 known CHAT vaccination sites.

In recent weeks there has been a new spin on the needles debate, provided
by David Gisselquist. He heads a group of American academics who conducted
a survey of various epidemiological studies of HIV, which they combined
with the proposal that levels of sexual activity in Africa can be roughly
equated with those in America and Europe. They came up with a remarkable
claim, which elicited much press coverage, that in marked contrast to
previous analyses, 60 per cent of all HIV spread in Africa was caused by
unsterilised needles and unscreened transfusions, and only some 30 per cent
by sex. (The usual ball-park figures are 10 per cent for parenteral - or
blood-borne - transmission and 80 per cent for sexual.) 'For the last 15
years,' Gisselquist commented to Reuters, 'the Aids establishment somehow
got on to the notion that we need to scare people about sex to prevent HIV
transmission.'

The Gisselquist group provides a long list of surveys they have examined,
and impressive pages of mathematical formulae, but their research smacks of
a lack of experience of the African epidemic on the ground. They highlight
early HIV surveys conducted between 1984 and 1988, but the experience of
most people who worked on Aids in Africa during that period is very
different. In Uganda, which was probably the first country in the world to
experience a visible community-wide Aids epidemic, almost every survey from
1985 onwards reveals intermediate levels of HIV- 1 infection for
0-to-4-year-olds (presumably largely caused by perinatal spread), which
plummet to virtually zero for 5-to-14-year-olds, then rise steeply for the
ages of 15 to 45 for women, and 20 to 55 for men, before tailing off to
zero for older individuals. Yet all age groups and both sexes would have
experienced comparable exposure to unsterile injections and unsafe
transfusions. The 'Christmas tree' pattern, which was recognised right
across the continent in the 1980s, is strongly suggestive of a pathogen
that is spread largely by the sexual route, with only minor roles played by
perinatal and parenteral spread.

Of course, the more publicity that is given to claims that dirty needles
are responsible for most of the HIV spread in Africa, the easier it becomes
to promote the idea that dirty needles might also have initiated the
epidemic. And there is clearly some linkage between the two theories, since
one of Gisselquist's co-authors is Ernest Drucker. My own belief (based on
many years' study of African epidemiological surveys) is that parenteral
spread may have increased in importance since the start of the epidemic,
and that nowadays it might cause between 10 and 20 per cent of new
infections. Most of those who have studied the African epidemic at close
range believe that Gisselquist's estimates are speculative, and that some
of his public utterances are simply irresponsible, given how many people
are eager to hear, dying to hear, that unprotected sex is not so dangerous
after all.

The arguments, denials and protestations will continue for some time, but I
believe that over the next few years it will gradually come to be realised
that the Aids pandemic was sparked by large-scale field trials of an
experimental polio vaccine - trials that employed African 'volunteers' as
guinea pigs.

An extended version of this article, entitled 'Dephlogistication, Imperial
Display, Apes, Angels and the Return of Mr Emile Zola', is available online
at http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmart in/dissent/documents/AIDS/.

Notes

* Reviewed in the LRB by Roy Porter (2 March 2000).

By 'earliest' I mean up to and including 1980 for Aids cases and up to and
including 1981 for HIV-1 infections. The new disease syndrome was first
reported in June 1981 in the US.

From the LRB letters page: [ 8 May 2003 ] Paul Osterrieth, Hilary
Koprowski, Stanley Plotkin, Vivian Wyatt [ 5 June 2003 ] David Seddon [ 10
July 2003 ] Stanley Plotkin, Edward Hooper [ 7 August 2003 ] Edward Hooper.

Edward Hooper's The River came out in 1999. A fuller account of his latest
findings appears in Origin of HIV and Emerging Persistent Viruses, the
proceedings of a conference held at the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei.

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

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Sheri Nakken, former R.N., MA, Hahnemannian Homeopath
Vaccination Information & Choice Network, Nevada City CA & Wales UK
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