Wie heeft gisteren (donderdag 10-02-2005) naar de docu over het onstaan van AIDS gekeken bij de VPRO op Nederland 3?
Het wordt nu wel héél duidelijk dat HIV/AIDS onstaan is toen men eind jaren '50 het polio vaccin creërde uit de nieren van apen...
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.
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 my book "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.
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 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.
Edward Hooper. February 29th, 2004.The latest scientific evidence strongly supports the OPV theoryJanuary 27th, 2005.
URL:
http://www.aidsorigins.com/badscience/bm7b.shtmlAchtergrondverhaal bij de documentaire:http://www.aidsorigins.com/http://www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n07/hoop01_.htmlhttp://www.uow.edu.au/art(...)S/Hooper03story.htmlEnkele prijzen die de documentaire
"The Origins of AIDS" uit België/Canada/Engeland/Frankrijk 2003/2004 heeft gewonnen:
* Best Direction, 2004 Hot Docs Festival
* The Silver Hugo for Documentary: Science/Nature at the 2004 Chicago International Television Awards
* The Rockie Award for Best Popular Science and Natural History Program at the 2004 Banff Television Festival.
* Emmy nomination 2004
* Prix Europa Current Affairs Television Programme of the Year, 2004
PS: volgende week donderdag, 17-02-2005 is het 2e deel te zien van deze documentaire.
VPRO, Nederland 3 om 23.45 uur.