[NVIC] Mutated Live Vaccine Polioviruses Pollute Water, Paralyze

[Guest guest]

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. 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./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, 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. " - Cheng, Associated

Press (October 5, 2007)

http://news./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...... " - 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 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. A. , 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. 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. 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 J. (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 '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) 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) DA, Witte JJ, L, Langmuir AD. Paralytic disease

associated with oral polio vaccines. JAMA 1964; 190-:41-8.

NOTES:

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

Aids and the Polio Vaccine

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 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 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 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 ] Osterrieth,

Koprowski, Stanley Plotkin, Vivian Wyatt [ 5 June 2003 ] Seddon [ 10

July 2003 ] Stanley Plotkin, Hooper [ 7 August 2003 ] Hooper.

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.

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

National Vaccine Information Center

email: news@...

voice: 703-938-dpt3

web: http://www.nvic.org

NVIC E-News is a free service of the National Vaccine Information Center

and is supported through membership donations.

NVIC is funded through the financial support of its members and does not

receive any government subsidies. Barbara Loe Fisher, President and Co-

founder.

Learn more about vaccines, diseases and how to protect your informed

consent rights at www.nvic.org

--------------------------------------------------------

Sheri Nakken, former R.N., MA, Hahnemannian Homeopath

Vaccination Information & Choice Network, Nevada City CA & Wales UK

Vaccines - http://www.wellwithin1.com/vaccine.htm Email classes start

October 17 & 18