In these difficult and ill-starred days it is always good to have something genuine to celebrate, and the announcement earlier this week that wild poliovirus has been eradicated from Africa is definitely an event worthy of celebration. On the face of it, this leaves just Pakistan and Afghanistan to go before the global eradication of polio can be announced. However, it is not quite that simple, because the fact that wild polioviruses have been eradicated from Africa does not mean that all polioviruses have been expunged from the continent.
Continue reading “A cause for celebration: the eradication of wild poliovirus from Africa.”An introduction to Lochlann Jain’s article about the OPV/AIDS hypothesis, and its treatment at the Royal Society meeting on the “Origins of HIV and the AIDS Epidemic”
This version was updated on February 16, 2023 using advice from Lochlann, who now uses a he/they pronoun.
S. Lochlann Jain is a Canadian Professor of Anthropology based at Stanford in California, and a Professor of Social Medicine at King’s College, London. In 2013 they published a nicely-titled book called “Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us” [Berkeley: University of California Press], based on their own experiences with cancer. The book was well-received and won several awards.
In 2017 Lochlann approached me for an interview: he was interested in writing a book about the Royal Society [RS] meeting in 2000 on the “Origins of HIV and the AIDS epidemic”. He explained that he had read Brian Martin’s writings on the subject such as “The Politics of a Scientific Meeting”, but was interested in another aspect, namely “why it was so seemingly easy to dismiss the detailed well-conceived challenge you made to science/virology” at the London meeting. That December Lochlann came to visit me at my home, and we spent 24 hours in quite extensive conversation. He also interviewed certain other contributors to the meeting, notably Hilary Koprowski’s former deputy, the vaccinologist Stanley Plotkin, the co-organiser of the meeting, virologist Robin Weiss, and another virologist, Preston Marx.
Continue reading “An introduction to Lochlann Jain’s article about the OPV/AIDS hypothesis, and its treatment at the Royal Society meeting on the “Origins of HIV and the AIDS Epidemic””