Moreover, in February I had just returned from a study visit to the United States, and could not, despite Hooper's allegations, easily have prepared a new pool of vaccine using the techniques which I had just learned. Hilary Koprowski Philadelphia. The report of the laboratory in which Paul Osterrieth worked recounts that cell cultures were achieved from baboon kidneys.
No mention is made of chimpanzee cell culture or vaccine production. Also in print, however, is the fact that Osterrieth prepared six chimpanzee kidneys for dispatch to the United States for use in a project on viral hepatitis.
In other words, when chimpanzees were used this was readily acknowledged. Hooper repeats his assertion that early cases of Aids occurred where CHAT was used, but neglects to mention that most of his cases are unconfirmed and that there were many places where CHAT was administered without subsequent Aids and, conversely, where putative Aids occurred but CHAT vaccination did not.
Stanley Plotkin University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. However, different groups receive injections from different sources. A survey conducted in Peshawar in showed that only 10 per cent of doctors there were paediatricians yet they were responsible for administering 90 cent of the injections given to young children.
These injections would not have been contaminated with blood from adults with HIV. Most of those infected with Ebola in the outbreak in Yambuku in were pregnant women who had attended a special clinic to receive vitamin B injections. Some sex workers have prophylactic weekly injections, and STD clinics treat both sex workers and their clients. While HIV may be mainly transmitted sexually, unsterile injections may also play a very important role.
There are more than sixteen billion injections given every year, almost all of them unsterile and most of them unnecessary and leading to the transmission of hepatitis, HIV and other bacteria, viruses and parasites. Vivian Wyatt University of Leeds. After nearly half a century, it is not surprising that Hilary Koprowski Letters, 8 May does not recall any local technician who would have had knowledge of the procedures for the preparation and administration of CHAT polio vaccine to , people in the Ruzizi Valley in the Congo early in , or that he dismisses the account of one technician, Jacques Kanyama, as reported by Edward Hooper LRB , 3 April.
David Seddon University of East Anglia. David Seddon Letters, 5 June wants to know how Ghislane Courtois knew the titre of the vaccine used in the Ruzizi mass vaccination trial in The titration was done in Philadelphia and Courtois was told to dilute the material sixty-fold in order to reach the desired dose.
Paul Osterrieth Letters, 8 May is correct in stating that the titre could not be ascertained in Stanleyville. Stanley Plotkin Doylestown, Pennsylvania. Paul Osterrieth, Stanley Plotkin and Hilary Koprowski Letters, 8 May , all of whom were intimately involved with the trials of the CHAT polio vaccine in Central Africa, continue to insist that this vaccine was never prepared in chimpanzee cells, and thus to deny any connection between the CHAT vaccination of about a million Africans in and the emergence of Aids in the same towns and villages between ten and twenty years later.
He adds that he has already denied these claims in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. In that article, he contradicted some of his own previous statements concerning, for instance, to which American institutions he sent chimpanzee kidneys , while remaining tight-lipped about other crucial details. Numerous witnesses from North America, Europe and Africa not just the two I cited disagree with Osterrieth on these two points, and some state that he prepared the vaccine himself.
But in which cells? Plotkin says that baboon kidneys were used for tissue culture, but the LMS annual reports record only a relatively tiny quantity of cells cultured from at most two baboons in In the annual reports, however, references to the CHAT testing programme and the vaccination trials are obscure and minimal, and there is no information as to what activities necessitated the use of more than four hundred chimpanzees between and Several witnesses recall that Osterrieth handled tissue, cells and sera from chimpanzees throughout this period.
Finally, Plotkin complains that most of what I claim to be early Aids cases from Africa are unconfirmed. Nine of my 39 cases were confirmed serologically; the others were diagnosed as probable Aids cases by experienced Africa-based physicians. For both the full series and the subset of confirmed cases, the statistical correlations with the CHAT vaccination sites are highly significant. Edward Hooper Bridgwater, Somerset. Stanley Plotkin. Virologists in the s were well aware that OPV rapidly loses titre during transportation and when its temperature rises.
So if Plotkin is correct when he says that the titration was done in Philadelphia, this would mean that the vaccine fed in Africa was of unknown titre. Studies conducted in the s by the National Institutes of Health revealed that the titre of OPVs fell between two-fold and eight-fold when moved between different labs in the United States, and an even greater loss of titre would be expected during the process of transporting OPV in an ice-box to Africa. If it did come from Philadelphia, why was the vaccine not titrated again in Africa, to allow its concentration to be properly established?
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Please change your browser settings to allow Javascript content to run. In the latest issue:. Did I invade? Do you exist? James Meek. Christ comes to Stockholm Patricia Lockwood. Prior to Dr. Salk's development of the safe and effective vaccine, which used "killed" polio cells to immunize patients with a much lower risk of infecting them, over 15, children were disabled by the disease every year, per the CDC. Following the distribution of the polio vaccine throughout the late s, cases in the United States dropped to under cases per year, and by the s, polio had been effectively eliminated.
However, while Dr. Salk's work with the polio vaccine is well known, fewer people are aware of the effort he put towards developing an AIDS vaccine. In his later years, he opened the Salk Institute for Biological Studies to fulfill his dream of creating a "collaborative environment where researchers could explore the basic principles of life and contemplate the wider implications of their discoveries for the future of humanity" per the Salk Institute.
In the s, AIDS was a little-known, much-feared, and widely stigmatized disease, which had affected , Americans by the end of the decade, according to Avert. In , both the Sabin vaccine and a third vaccine, developed by Jonas Salk, were found to be contaminated with SV40, a monkey virus which is nothing like HIV.
SV40 appears not to have harmed the millions of people who received it. But the identity of the virus found in has never been determined. Some have been tempted to speculate that HIV reached Africans through this vaccine but most researchers think the origins of the virus are more complex. The main difficulty is the size of the evolutionary gap between HIV and its known forerunners. Most of the monkeys used to make early polio vaccine came from India, where none is known to be naturally infected with SIVs.
It is possible that during the late s some African green monkeys were used, but this cannot be proved. There are further problems. He would have had to be infected with HIV some years before this.
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