Edward Hooper's site on the Origins of AIDS
Items related to conferences on the origins of AIDS.
By Lawrence K. Altman, The New York Times, September 12, 2000
© 2000 The New York Times Company
Tests have failed to support a theory that the worldwide AIDS epidemic was touched off because an experimental oral polio vaccine used in Africa more than 40 years ago was made from chimpanzee tissue, scientists reported yesterday in London.
Continue reading “Tests Fail to Support Theory on AIDS and Role of Chimpanzees and Vaccine”
Patricia Reaney, Reuters, Philadelphia Daily News, September 12, 2000
© 2000 Philadelphia Daily News
AIDS experts yesterday dismissed a theory about the origins of the HIV virus which suggests the disease was spread to humans through a contaminated polio vaccine used in Africa in the late 1950s.
Continue reading “Vaccine-AIDS Link Dismissed Scientists say Virus Predates Polio Serum”
Continue reading “Poliovaccine Testing Results are Not the Endgame”
Nigel Hawkes, The Times (London), September 12, 2000
© 2000 Times Newspapers Limited
NEW tests have exploded the theory that the Aids epidemic was started by a contaminated polio vaccine in Africa.
Steve Sternberg, USA TODAY, September 12, 2000
© 2000 Gannett Company, Inc.
Tests of polio vaccine stored for nearly half a century undercut the notion that the AIDS virus leapt from monkeys to man through polio shots given to African children in the 1950s, experts said Monday.
Guardian (UK), Tuesday 12 September 2000
James Meek, science correspondent
The disturbing and fiercely disputed theory that the Aids virus was unleashed accidentally by western medical researchers in Africa in the 1950s gained new impetus yesterday, with the emergence of fresh witness testimony about the use of chimpanzees in an African mass vaccination trial.
Facts on File World News Digest, September 11, 2000
© 2000 Facts on File, Inc.
Claudio Basilico of the New York University School of Medicine September 11 released the results of a study that had failed to link the 1950s distribution of a polio vaccine in Africa to the beginning of the spread of AIDS. The announcement was made at the Royal Society, a London research organization. The link had been suggested most recently by a 1999 book by British journalist Edward Hooper, entitled The River, which posited that the vaccine had been cultivated using tissue from chimpanzees, the animal in which many scientists believed the AIDS virus had originated.
Continue reading “Tests Fail to Link AIDS Spread, Polio Vaccine”
Embargoed until 9/11/00 15:45 BST
Mr. Hooper has presented the hypothesis that CHAT, a type 1 polio vaccine developed in the US by Dr. Koprowski, and tested there, in Europe and in the former Belgian Congo in the late 50s, was contaminated with HIV. He is not the first to present that hypothesis, and many scientists, including myself, (as I was involved in those tests) have spent a great deal of time researching the origin of the HIV viruses. During the last year, I have studied Mr. Hooper’s book and have done an extensive reconstruction of what actually happened 40 years ago, based on documents and testimony. I also did everything possible to facilitate the PCR tests on the vaccine samples conducted by Wistar.
Continue reading “Press Conference Statement by Stanley Plotkin MD”
The Year 2000 for many is just a chronological event, but for those of us in polio research the year was to mark the eradication of polio from this planet. It has been fifty years since I was the first scientist to successfully and safely immunize a human being against this dreaded killer.
Huntly Collins, Contra Costa Times (California), September 10, 2000
© 2000 Contra Costa Times
Was a monumental effort to conquer polio, once the leading cause of physical disability, responsible for unleashing the world AIDS pandemic, which has stricken 53 million people, most of them in Africa?