Article concerning The River: A Journey Back to the Source of HIV and AIDS

WHEN THE BLOOD LEFT Bill Hamilton it drained away as fast as a reputation, starving his great mind of oxygen and leaving his body in a coma. Hailed as the "most distinguished Darwinian since Darwin", Hamilton had just returned to the UK from the Congo where he had been seeking evidence that another great scientist had inadvertently triggered the deaths of 16 million people.

"Was polio vaccine the cause of AIDS?"

(Review of The River: A Journey Back to the Source of HIV and AIDS) by Matt Ridley

Bill Hamilton, the brilliant Oxford zoologist who died last week, caught his fatal disease while in the Congo. He was there in search of chimpanzee stools with which to test a radical theory about the origin of the AIDS virus. Saddened by his death, I spent the weekend reading the book that had convinced him of this theory. It has shaken me to the core.

Review of The River: A Journey Back to the Source of HIV and Aids by Edward Hooper.

More than a thousand pages long and the fruit of a decade's work, The River amounts to something more than the attempt to track down the source of Aids. It is, in fact, three books rolled into one. The investigation advertised by the title is, of course, of the highest significance. It was in 1981 that attention was first drawn to the condition, as evidence mounted that gays in New York and California were falling victim to illnesses like pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP) and Kaposi's sarcoma, rarely seen in otherwise healthy young people. A number of theories were proposed as to its origins, some unscientific ('the wrath of God'), and others (homosexuality or Haitians) generally discredited once the human immunodeficiency virus had been isolated.

Review of Hooper, E. 1999. The River: a Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS

Times Higher Educational Supplement, 18 February 2000

Many Africans and African-Americans believe that HIV and AIDS were either the direct invention of the white man--cooked up, for example, in the biological warfare labs in Beltsville, MD--or somehow preferentially directed at them by wicked, white scientists. A new book by Edward Hooper suggests that something like this may actually have happened, that the AIDS epidemic may have started when HIV was accidentally introduced into hundreds and perhaps thousands of Africans during vaccinations of over one million people, mostly children, against polio in 1958 and 1959 in Rwanda-Burundi and selected places in the Congo.

Review of The River: A Journey Back to the Source of HIV and AIDS

Edward Hooper, The River: a journey back to the source of HIV and AIDS, London and New York, Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1999, xxiii + 1070 pp., including index and appendices.

It has recently come to light that in Gateshead in the mid-1950s about 250,000 children were chosen for a polio vaccine trial. Parents were given minimal information before the children were called for shots of the oral vaccine. It is now clear that New Variant CJD has nothing to do with eating beef. It is the result of this trial. A few batches of the vaccine, cultured on bovine tissue, were contaminated with the virus which produces NVCJD.

Eight years ago Tom Curtis reported that AIDS could have been spread by an experimental polio vaccine grown on monkey kidneys. Scientists sniffed. Journalists scoffed. A polio hero sued. The story died. Now, a new book says the theory wasn't so stupid after all.

by Brad Tyer, Houston Press, 20-26 January 2000

Letter to the editor about The River: A Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS

Stanley A. Plotkin and Hilary Koprowski say in their letter (Science's Compass, 24 Dec., p. 2450) that in my book, The River: A Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS (Little, Brown, 1999), I suggest that they "covertly used chimpanzee cells to produce the live oral polio vaccine (OPV) that was used in the first mass campaign with OPV in the former Belgian Congo."

Letter concerning The River: A Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS

Dear sir,

As author of "The River - a Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS" [Little, Brown, 1999], I would like to make a few comments about, and corrections to, Carol Ann Campbell's otherwise excellent article "AIDS Jersey Roots Explored", published on December 26, 1999.

Review of The River: A Journey Back to the Source of HIV and AIDS, by Edward Hooper, Harmondsworth: Penguin/Boston: Little, Brown, 1999, 1070+xxxiii pages, £25/$35.

This book is a scientific blockbuster about the origin of AIDS. It is in the great tradition of scientific detective stories except that, instead of reconstructing a scientist's discovery, it is a process of scientific discovery itself. It is also a pathbreaking endeavour in integrative investigation, cutting across the usual disciplines and involving everything from molecular biology to subtle interviewing strategies. Finally, it is intensely engaging to read.

Virus evolved from Clinton prison polio vaccine, author contends

[Article about Edward Hooper's book The River: A Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS]

Star-Ledger (Newark, New Jersey), 26 December 1999

Patient No. 6 baffled James Oleske.

The pediatrician couldn't understand the little girl's mysterious symptoms, such as sepsis, and a rare pneumonia he had never seen before. For some unknown reason, the child's immune system was failing to protect her from these strange infections.

Letter to the editor about The River: A Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS

Responding to The River

In the book The River: A Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS (Little, Brown, 1999), author Edward Hooper suggests that we covertly used chimpanzee cells to produce the live oral polio vaccine (OPV) that was used in the first mass campaign with OPV in the former Belgian Congo. Hooper postulated that the cells contained a simian immunodeficiency virus that later mutated to human immunodeficiency virus.

(Review of The River: A Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS)

Writer says the disease may have jumped from chimps to humans via an experimental polio vaccine--and he warns that cross-species transplants could likewise backfire. But the man who led the African inoculation research calls the theory outrageous, and the scientific community has expressed little interest.

New book charges 1950s polio vaccine spread AIDS in Africa

Laurie Garrett, Staff Writer

 Newsday, Tuesday 14 December 1999

EVER SINCE the AIDS epidemic began, it has sparked conspiracy theories. The latest, reincarnated from an idea forwarded in 1992, asserts that African polio vaccines of the 1950s were contaminated with the animal version of HIV and that a subsequent cover-up has hidden the evidence.

Edward Hooper's 12 December 1999 letter to the New York Times about The River: A Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS

Response to Plotkin and Koprowski's letter to the New York Times ; sent 12 December 1999. Publication status unknown.

To the Editor,

In their letter of Dec. 7 ("Challenging a Theory"), doctors Stanley Plotkin and Hilary Koprowski "state categorically that no chimpanzee tissues were used by us for polio vaccine production". In so doing, they clearly hope to refute the central hypothesis of my book, "The River", that the administration of an experimental polio vaccine, CHAT, in central Africa in 1957-1960 may represent the occasion when the simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) of the chimpanzee entered humans, and began adapting to become HIV-1, thus sparking the AIDS pandemic.

Challenging a Theory
To the Editor:

The Doctor's World column "New Book Challenges Theories of AIDS Origin" on Nov. 30 describes the hypothesis that H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, was initially transmitted to humans during the first large-scale trials of oral polio vaccine in what was then the Belgian Congo. Although we are not named in the article, it is common knowledge in the scientific community that we conducted those trials. The hypothesis is based on the suggestion in a recently published book that we used chimpanzee cells to prepare the vaccine, and that these cells were, unknown to us, contaminated with a precursor of the human AIDS virus.

The Doctor's World column on AIDS origins makes valid points in the argument that Edward Hooper's theory of vaccine contamination should be explored further. Those scientists who feel the legitimization of Hooper's theory would tarnish public confidence in the safety of vaccines are not only shortsighted, but naïve.

THE DOCTOR'S WORLD
New Book Challenges Theories of AIDS Origins
[Review of The River: A Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS ]

By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN, M.D.
New York Times, Tuesday 30 November 1999, pp. D1, D6.

Is AIDS a disaster inadvertently brought on by humans that arose from early testing of a polio vaccine in Africa in the 1950's?

Did a vaccine cause AIDS?

Review of THE RIVER: A JOURNEY BACK TO THE SOURCE OF HIV AND AIDS.
By Edward Hooper. Little, Brown; 1,104 pages; $34. Allen Lane; £25

A frozen sample in a Philadelphia lab could illuminate the origin of AIDS

'Every one of all known HIV-1 cases in Africa before 1981 came from places within 160km of those CHAT vaccination sites.' Could the AIDS pandemic have been sparked off by polio researchers in Belgium's former African colonies? ANDREW DONALDSON reports on a new book that claims to have found the source of HIV.

[Commentary on The River: A Journey Back to the Source of HIV and AIDS]

FEBRUARY 1959 and the wind of change is blowing through Africa. Two doctors, an American and a Belgian, find themselves in Leopoldville soon after the first pro-independence riots in the capital of the then Belgian Congo.

Were chimps the source of HIV? Charles Gilks on Edward Hooper's controversial book

New Scientist, 13 November 1999, pages 54-55.

FACED with tragedy and terror, it is very human to ask why? HIV/AIDS is undoubtedly the most terrifying of all emerging human diseases. More than 35 million people are infected or sick, around 16 million have already died and worldwide at least 6000 people become infected every day. The strength of Edward Hooper's obsession with the question matches the scale of the pandemic. How did it start? Is anyone to blame? Could it happen again?

A review by Robin A. Weiss*

The River: A Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS

by Edward Hooper

Little, Brown, New York, 1999. 1104 pp. $35. ISBN 0-316-37261-7. Penguin, London, 1999. 1104 pp. £25. ISBN 0-7139-9335-9.

Science, 12 November 1999; Volume 286, pp. 1305-1306

Thanks to immunization, polio like smallpox may soon be eradicated. But did the trials of early polio vaccines trigger AIDS? The central thesis of Edward Hooper's new book, The River, is that they did. Hooper argues that both AIDS viruses, HIV-1 and HIV-2, first infected humans via contaminated oral poliovirus vaccines (OPV). He claims these vaccines were grown in kidney cell cultures derived in the 1950s from chimpanzees and sooty mangabeys, respectively, that were infected with simian immunodeficiency viruses (SIVs). Although this notion has been explored before, no one previously has researched the history of polio vaccine trials and early AIDS cases so exhaustively. Hooper builds up layer upon layer of circumstantial evidence and plausible conjecture, until he declares: "The reader must make up his mind or her mind. I have made up mine." Yet after having read his 858 pages of text and 175 pages of notes and references, I remain undecided on the origins of HIV.

By David Morgan, Monday, November 8, 1999

PHILADELPHIA, Nov 8 (Reuters) - An eminent U.S. medical research centre will release lab specimens from a 1950s polio vaccine project in Africa in hopes of dispelling claims that its scientists inadvertently caused the AIDS epidemic, officials said on Monday.

The author's response to customer's comment on The River by Dr Claude Koprowski

(Reply concerning The River: A Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS) Submitted to Amazon.com, early November 1999 (not published)

While Dr Claude Koprowski's vigorous defence of his father, Dr Hilary Koprowski, is understandable, it is - unfortunately - littered with error and false assumptions.

Author blames polio vaccine tests for scourge

For more than a decade now, Edward Hooper, a former British reporter for the BBC in Africa, has been crisscrossing the world doggedly pursuing clues to the most frightening human mystery of our age - the cause of HIV/AIDS.

Character Assassination by Supposition

Review of The River: A Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS

Reviewer: Claude Koprowski, M.D. from Oxford, Maryland

amazon.com October 12, 1999

There is little new of consequence here other than the author's character assassination by supposition. Although superficially The River looks like a well researched and documented work, in reality the conclusions Edward Hooper reaches are based on his own prejudices and pseudo logic but not fact.As one other reviewer noted, it is "up the river without a paddle."

Edward Hooper's unpublished letter to the editor of Nature in response to John Moore's review (Nature, 23 September 1999)

September 27, 1999.

Dear Mr Campbell,

I read with great interest John Moore's review of my book, The River. Might I point out that it contained a number of errors? I would appreciate the opportunity to correct these in your pages.

Review of The River: A Journey Back to the Source of HIV and AIDS

Lancet, September 25, 1999; Volume 354, Number 9184

Edward Hooper's river--at 1000 pages, more Amazon or Congo than Thames--is the AIDS epidemic in full flood, but what interests him is the trickle with which it all began. What also interests both him and the Oxford evolutionary biologist W D Hamilton, who writes the enthusiastic foreword to this provocative book, is what lessons might be drawn if the origin of HIV/AIDS is indeed an instance of medicine gone wrong. The hypothesis, which in part at least is testable, is that one type of oral poliovaccine developed in the 1950s involved culture in kidney cells of chimpanzees. The chimpanzee simian immunodeficiency virus is the non-human one most closely related to HIV-1 and, the argument runs, it was via the vaccination campaigns in Africa in the late 1950s (and possibly elsewhere) that SIV reached man. After that came mutation to HIV and spread to eventual epidemicity via several routes, one possibility being Haitian technicians returning home after assisting the newly independent Congo republic. An iatrogenic disaster in other words, "bidding to prove itself more expensive in lives than all the human attritions put in motion by Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot" (Hamilton).

Review of The River: A Journey Back to the Source of HIV and AIDS by Edward Hooper Penguin: 1999. 1,070 pp. £25 (hbk)
Nature, Vol. 401, pp. 325-326, 23 September 1999

The theory that polio-vaccine researchers are responsible for AIDS is leaky.

(Interview re The River: A Journey Back to the Source of HIV and AIDS)

The race to find a polio vaccine in the 1950s now appears to have caused the modern AIDs epidemic. Edward Hooper, who has traced the virus back to mass vaccinations of African children, explains his devastating findings to Penelope Dening