*** 01-Dec-99 ***

Title: HEALTH: Debate Rages Anew Over Origin of AIDS

By Marwaan Macan-Markar

MEXICO CITY, Dec 1 (IPS) - The long-held belief that the  acquired
immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) began in Africa has been
challenged by a British writer, sparking off a fresh debate on the
origins of the disease.

In his recent book, "The River: A Journey Back To The Source Of
HIV And AIDS," Edward Hooper put forward the provocative theory
that AIDS actually was introduced to the African continent by
Western medicine.

According to Hooper, this happened during the tests for a polio
vaccine, conducted in the 1950s and 1960s in certain parts of East
and Central Africa by Western medical researchers.

Hooper suspects that the vaccine used in the CHAT experimental
programme accidentally had been contaminated by a monkey virus
that had traces of the simian immunodeficiency virus.

This is not the first time that such a theory has been
propounded; an article in the US-based magazine "Rolling Stone"
made the same charge in 1992 and Hooper's critics have turned to
the research that followed that article to dismiss his
conclusions.

At that time, says Lisa Jacobs of the UN's joint programme on
HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), the scientific community was intrigued by the
"incredible hypothesis," and the validity of the theory was put to
test.

"The result was that there were too many holes to make it a
useful theory," she adds.

The same was true of Hooper's book, Jacobs says. "Most experts,
who base their opinions on scientific grounds, believe Hooper's
theory to be highly unlikely."

A British newspaper published a report containing similar
sentiments - that Hooper's argument has been rejected by "most of
the scientific community."

The author has his defenders, however, who argue that the studies
carried out after the "Rolling Stone" article appeared were partly
based on a published finding that later "was shown to be in
error."

And just last week, an article in a US newspaper had this to say:
"Experts writing in journals have praised Mr. Hooper's diligence
and scholarship, and the plausibility of the thesis."

Since it was detected by doctors in 1981, the origins of HIV/AIDS
have been a mystery, and the desperate search for answers to its
genesis has spawned myths and a variety of theories.

Among the more bizarre explanations was that HIV was an alien
from outer space or that it was an agent of biological warfare.

Virologists, on the other hand, have settled for more plausible
reasons like the one that says "a forerunner of HIV could have
`jumped' species from monkeys to humans if blood from a monkey was
splashed into a cut or a mucous membrane, such as the eye."

Nevertheless, states a UNAIDS release, a convincing answer has
remained elusive.

The medical community does believe that HIV may have entered the
human population sometime in the 1970s and that its explosive
spread during the years that followed was the result of
"urbanisation, cheap travel and major international conflicts
increasing the potential for people from different communities to
have sex with each other."

Today, the worst hit region in the world is Sub-Saharan Africa,
where close to 3,800 HIV/AIDS victims are detected every day, with
almost 90 percent of them having indulged in heterosexual sex.

According to a World Bank study, AIDS is taking a "devastating
toll in human suffering and death in Africa."

Of the 30 million people who have contracted the disease
worldwide, 63 percent are from Africa, a continent that has only
10 percent of the world's population.

The study points out that AIDS now exceeds malaria and other
conditions as the leading cause of death of people aged between 15-
49 in more than 15 countries.

Such devastating reality has prompted the Western medical
establishment to be hostile towards research into the origins of
this disease, says Bill Hamilton, an evolutionary biologist at the
University of Oxford, who wrote the foreword to Hooper's book.

"It cannot bring itself to believe that a disaster of this
magnitude could have been started by one of its own," he adds.

Hamilton has encountered many experts who have refused to discuss
Hooper's theory in public.

"Only recently a colleague said that he supposed there might be
truth in the theory but he wasn't going to publish anything on it.
He went on to say that he would lose his grant from the medical
research body that supports him," he reveals.

What impressed Hamilton about Hooper's story was "the
synchronization of time and place."

"None of the facts amounts to proof but taken together, the trend
and accumulation is impressive. At least the OPV (oral polio
vaccine) theory of the origins of AIDS now merits our attention,"
he stresses.

In his book, Hooper throws out a challenge to test his
conclusions. He wants one of the known samples of the suspected
batch of vaccines still preserved at the US-based Wistar Institute
to be tested to see if it contains HIV or traces of the simian
virus.

To achieve that, however, will require more convincing on
Hooper's part.

For one, the Institute has been reluctant to authorise the
release of the CHAT sample and, on the other, Hooper had been
informed by an official of the World Health Organisation that the
origins of AIDS was "certainly of no interest today."
(END/IPS/mmm/mk/99)


Origin: ROMAWAS/HEALTH/
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       [c] 1999, InterPress Third World News Agency (IPS)
                     All rights reserved

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