Yeah, the term "green monkey disease" rings a bell, vaguely.  But I
don't think it's AIDS.  Isn't it =="Ebola fever"?  That was indeed a
highly lethal disease, but it killed rapidly and through more direct
means than knocking out the immune system.  There was an outbreak
in Africa, and some cases in England from imported green monkeys.

(Cross-posting to sci.med to troll for somebody with some expertise)

         PGP 2 key by finger or e-mail

Just as an addendum to all this...
I am taking a microbiology class this semester: Microbes and Man.  Lots of
really interesting stuff about disease...

In Tuesday's lecture, my professor stated that AIDS was put upon humankind
back in the 50's by 5M doses of a polio vaccine that was prepared from monkey's
livers, and disseminated throughout Africa.  Supposedly, the monkeys from which
the livers were taken were infected with SAIDS, simian acquired immune
deficiency syndrome, which is also a retro virus.  My professor further
claims that there are two pieces of evidence to support this:  that
there are 7M cases of AIDS in Africa, out of 12M world-wide, and that
the reverse transcriptase in AIDS and SAIDS both have the same transcription
error rate (about 1 in 2000 bases).

That better that half of all AIDS cases worldwide are in Africa tells
epidemiologists that the disease first started there.  

Also, since the SAIDS reverse transcriptase makes so makes so many errors, and
given the number of doses prepared, it may be that SAIDS could have mutated
enough in that baseline to become AIDS

      ______________________________________________________________
 Ba ka nurfolrui lepo trati lo klinorbli kinoi danza lepo suksi lo norbli.

       Only by attempting the absurd can we achieve the impossible.
      ______________________________________________________________

Your professor reads _Rolling Stone_ too, I see.

I read this in Rolling Stone a year or so ago (and one other lurker/poster out
there also mentioned it recently), but I think that this is far from accepted
as definitive.  That AIDS (HIV) originated in Africa is not in doubt, is it?  
But the genesis of the virus itself as definitely simian is, right now, just
an interesting hypothesis, I believe.

Of course, I'm a physics professors, for undergrads yet--what do I know?

Derek, where are you?  You know a lot about this stuff.

Vicki "Wishing that I hadn't recycled all my old mags.  That'll teach me."
Robinson

==============================================================================
Vicki Robinson                            |My opinions are mine.  Although any
National Technical Institute for the Deaf |sane person would agree with me,  
Rochester Institute of Technology         |the same can not necessarily be

===============================================================================

This theory has some adherents, but it also has detractors, and it's
certainly neither proven nor generally accepted yet.

On a test given by that professor, it's the right answer, but not in the
scientific community.

(I'm not saying that the professor is wrong, just that his claim is not as
universally accepted as he would have you believe.)

--

----------------------------------------------------
Jack Hamilton            POB 281107 SF CA 94128  USA

#include standard urban.legend.header:  I forget where I heard it,
but I seem to remember something about one of the more recent polio
vaccines using {*filter*} serum from one of the monkey species that
AIDS was first linked with.  The fact pattern goes on to suggest that
this was one of the injections used in Africa and it corrosponds
with the time AIDS first showed up.

Sound like a lot to buy?
Anyone else hear this?
It was at the theory stage as I recall, and no one seemed to pay
much attention....

-uni- (Dark)

--
Heute ist Mirroccoli Tag - Find me Sick, Dark and Twisted, and I'm happy.
073BB885A786F666  6E6D4506F6EDBC17 - One if by land, two if by sea.

Yeah.  I was reading about this idea over on sci.med.aids not long
ago, and I believe the Wistar Institute, which produced the vaccine in
the first place, is also suing Rolling Stone (or maybe the author of
the article, I forget which).

Wistar did its own internal investigation of the possibility that AIDS
had been started off by those vaccines.  Their conclusion was that it
would require a combination of events, each of which was exceedingly
unlikely.  While "impossible" clearly wasn't something they felt
comfortable saying, it seemed to be damn near.

BTW, did your prof say "livers", or did you?  If I remember right, the
vaccine was prepared using kidneys, not livers, of green monkeys.

There are some other problems, like a sailor who died in England of
something an awful lot like AIDS back in the 50s, and there appeared
to be no way he could have been infected by the vaccine.

  -- David Wright, Hitachi Computer Products (America), Inc.  Waltham, MA

     but you're free to disagree, you poor deluded creature

...                                                                      ^^^^

There was an article about the ebola virus in a New Yorker last year
around October.

The action is set in Maryland.

regards,
sheila

The polio vaccine/AIDS connection has been kicking around for
awhile and continually gets dredged up by the popular press.
There has not been one shred of evidence that the polio vaccine
grown in monkey cells ever had HIV.  This was simply pure
speculation.  

There are multiple problems with your above statements.  I
believe that kidney cells not liver was used as the host cell
for growth.  There are also not 12 million cases of AIDS world
wide, but 12 million people infected with HIV.  Finally the
similarity of error rate says nothing about genetic
relatedness.  HIV and SIV may be genetically related, but the
error rate of their RT proteins is not pertinent to that fact.

HIV most likely originated in Africa.  Given the nature of
genetically isolated people, close contact with multiple other
primate species, and the opening up of the continent after
WWII, it is not surprising that new strains of virus (without
direct intervention by man) would develop.  In fact, there are
projects going on right now to document this possbility by
studying tribes in New Guinea that are being exposed to the
rest of the world for the first time.

There are many in the virology community who believe that the
origin of new viral diseases arises from contact between
isolated groups of man and animals.

Most likely there was some progenitor HIV-like virus that
gradually evolved to select genotypes that were better adapted
for different primates.  Thus HIV cannot cause AIDS in
monkeys.  We see similar patterns with other viruses.  Smallpox
was devastating for humans.  Monkeypox however is not that bad
for humans (although the two viruses are probably closer
genetically to each other than HIV and SIV) and can only be
gotten from a monkey.  People with monkeypox don't transmit the
disease to other humans.  Viruses over time will adapt to their
host and sometimes lose the ability to grow in other species.

All retroviruses (like all RNA containing viruses) have
inherent high error rates in their polymerase (which is what
reverse transcriptase is).  This is because RNA is more
unstable than DNA.  This is used by the viruses to their
advantage by allowing them to mutate very rapidly.  When you
throw in assortment of segmented genes to this, you get viruses
like influenza that can mutate enough to cause whole new
epidemics every 7 years on average.

Mike Kurilla

Here's an article from sci.med.aids discussing that theory:
|
|                   AIDS INFORMATION NEWSLETTER
|                   Michael Howe, MSLS, Editor
|                     AIDS Information Center
|                VA Medical Center, San Francisco
|                     (415) 221-4810 ext 3305
|                          July 17, 1992
|
|               SPECIAL TOPIC ISSUE: ORIGIN OF AIDS
|
|                      DEBATE ON AIDS ORIGIN
|
|     An article featured in Rolling Stone magazine (March 19, 1992)
|that addresses the origin of AIDS has prompted a lot of
|controversy.  Tom Curtis' article, "The Origin of AIDS,"
|hypothesizes that HIV first entered humans in Africa via an {*filter*}
|polio vaccine widely administered in the late 1950s.  Some
|researchers argue that the article's hypothesis is not impossible
|because simian viruses were found to taint some early polio
|vaccines.  However, most AIDS researchers believe the hypothesis
|is inaccurate.  The article explains how Hilary Koprowski, former
|director of Philadelphia's Wistar Institute and one of the pioneers
|of the polio vaccine, may have administered an HIV-contaminated
|{*filter*}vaccine which was used to control polio epidemics in the
|Belgian Congo--now comprised of Zaire, Rwanda and Burundi--and
|later used widely in Poland and Switzerland. Curtis indicates that
|HIV infection may have transpired via mucosal cells, lesions in the
|mouth, or through aerosolized virus trickling into the lungs.
|Curtis also suggests Kaprowski believed that uninfected macaques
|from India and the Philippine were used, but the macaques may have
|contracted SIV while caged with other infected animals. (Science.
|1992 Mar 20;255(5051):1505).
|
|           RESEARCHERS TO PROBE THEORY ON AIDS ORIGIN
|
|   PHILADELPHIA (UPI) -- The Wistar Institute, an independent
|research facility on the University of Pennsylvania campus, is
|assembling a research team to test a theory that AIDS originated
|more than 30 years ago.  Wistar Director Giovanni Rovera said he
|is in the process of assembling a team of researchers to evaluate
|the theory which was presented in a Rolling Stone article.  The
|article speculates that HIV may have been present in tissue from
|a monkey kidney used by Dr. Hilary Koprowski to grow a polio
|vaccine distributed in the Belgian Congo.
|    Koprowski is quoted in the article as saying that samples of
|the original vaccine are still preserved in freezers at Wistar.
|Lisa Dominici, a Wistar spokeswoman, said if the specimens are
|located, scientists should be able to determine if they contain
|HIV. But she said most experts agree it is highly unlikely that the
|current AIDS epidemic originated from a contaminated monkey kidney.
|"The article is highly speculative and the overwhelming reaction
|from the scientific community is that it's totally unreasonable,"
|Dominici said. "But that doesn't mean we're going to dismiss it.
|We plan to handle this in a responsible way."
|(UPI, March 19, 1992).
|
|         PANEL APPOINTED TO PROBE THEORY ON AIDS ORIGIN
|
|   A blue-ribbon panel of six scientists has been appointed to
|evaluate a theory that AIDS originated in a batch of polio vaccine
|prepared at the Wistar Institute and distributed in Africa. Wistar
|Director Giovanni Rovera said he appointed the panel "in the
|interest of responsible scientific research and accurate
|reporting," after the theory appeared in the March 19 issue of
|Rolling Stone magazine.
|   The committee is co-chaired by Dr. Claudio Basilico, chairman
|of the microbiology department at New York University's School of
|Medicine and Frank Lilly, a molecular genetics professor at Albert
|Einstein College of Medicine in New York. The other committee
|members include Ronald Desrosiers, professor of microbiology and
|molecular genetics at Harvard Medical School; David Ho, director
|of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center and a microbiology
|professor at New York University Medical Center; Eckard Wimmer,
|chairman of the microbiology department of the School of Medicine
|of State University of New York at Stony Brook; and Clayton Buck,
|professor and director of scientific development at the Wistar
|Institute. (UPI, April 13, 1992).
|
|                NO AIDS RISK FROM POLIO VACCINES
|
| From the cooking.net">food and Drug Administration:
|
|    Recently several stories have appeared in the media linking
|early polio vaccine trials to the origin or spread of the AIDS
|virus.  The Public Health Service has seen no convincing evidence
|to support this alleged connection or even indicates that it is
|remotely possible.  On the contrary, PHS, the World Health
|Organization and all other leading medical authorities who have
|evaluated this question have concluded that the polio vaccine does
|not and has never posed a risk of transmitting the AIDS virus or
|any related virus.
|    The theory which alleges that polio vaccine is linked to the
|spread of AIDS, postulates that kidneys from monkeys infected with
|various retroviruses are, or were, used in the production of polio
|vaccine.  According to the theory, this rendered the vaccine
|capable of infecting humans with the AIDS virus.
|    There are several factors which refute the credibility of this
|theory:
|    -  Monkey kidneys are used as cultures for producing polio
|vaccine, but these monkeys are not infected with the simian
|immunodeficiency virus (SIV)---a retrovirus which affects monkeys.
|The absence of this retrovirus in these monkeys in the United
|States is assured, in that only monkeys from SIV-free colonies are
|used.  Every monkey is tested for antibodies to SIV.
|    -  Even with regard to older polio vaccines produced in kidney
|cells from monkeys that may have been infected (before modern
|screening tests were available), extensive evidence indicates that
|these vaccines did not contain or transmit SIV. Such vaccines were
|tested by various laboratory techniques, and no SIV was detected.
|Individuals vaccinated with such vaccines have been tested and
|found not to have antibodies to SIV.  In addition, multiple efforts
|to recover SIV from kidney cells have failed, and  attempts to get
|SIV to replicate in monkey kidney cells exposed to a highly
|infectious inoculum have also failed.
|     -  There are no reliable scientific data which indicate that
|the AIDS virus originated from monkey retroviruses.
|    -  The World Health Organization has stated that there is no
|evidence of transmission of SIV to humans via polio vaccine.
|    In summary, several avenues of research show that the theory
|that links the polio vaccine to the origin or spread of AIDS does
|not make much sense from a virologic standpoint.  Additionally, the
|theory does nothing to explain the known epidemiology of the AIDS
|pandemic, and therefore provides no substantive insight into the
|real origin or nature of AIDS.
|    The existence of this unsubstantiated theory should not deter
|people from receiving needed polio vaccinations.  Polio is a very
|real infectious disease which has killed and crippled millions
|throughout the world.  Global  polio vaccine immunization efforts
|have saved literally millions of lives, particularly in the Third
|World, and should not be undermined by sensationalized speculation.
|(FDA Release, April 6, 1992).
|
|"Origins of HIV"
|Lancet (07/04/92) Vol. 340, No. 8810, P. 58  (Neal, Keith)  
|     The urbanization of Africa may explain how two {*filter*}ly
|transmitted strains of HIV suddenly appeared and quickly prompted
|an epidemic, writes Keith Neal of the Westbrook House in Sheffield,
|U.K.  Neal disputes Professor Lecatsas's and Professor Alexander's
|conclusion that the simultaneous incidence of HIV-1 and HIV-2 is
|proof that the contamination of poliovirus vaccine was the origin
|of AIDS.  Neal argues that changes that occurred in Africa since
|the end of colonialism have affected the HIV epidemic, especially
|rapid urbanization across the continent and a mass movement of
|people due to civil war and starvation.  HIV-1 and HIV-2 were
|brought into the cities and towns through the erosion of tribal
|traditions and the resulting increase in {*filter*} freedom, the
|encouragement of multiple sex partners, the rise in poverty among
|women leading to increasing numbers turning to prostitution, and
|the rising demand for prostitution spurred by the migrant worker
|system.  In addition, the developing road system transported the
|virus across the continent as indicated by high rates of infection
|among truck drivers.
|
|"Origins of HIV"
|Lancet (06/06/92) Vol339, No.8806, P.1427 (Lecatsas, G. and
|Alexander, J.J.)
|      Due to the circumstantial evidence regarding the possibility
|that the poliovirus vaccine could have been the origin of AIDS, to
|ignore it would be ethically and scientifically wrong, write G.
|Lecatsas and J.J. Alexander of the Medical University of Southern
|Africa in Medunsa, South Africa.  In the March 7 edition of the
|Lancet, Kyle discussed the possibility of HIV's origin lying in
|poliovaccines, an idea that was proposed in 1989 and again at the
|International Congress of Virology in Berlin, in August, 1990.
|Lecatsas and Alexander have tested a healthy vervet monkey for
|major HIV-1 antigens and the results were positive.  Using this
|animal's tissue for human vaccine production would be unethical.
|But this could have happened several times because monkey kidney
|tissue was first used in poliovaccine production in the 1950s.
|These cultures could boost the growth of retroviruses.  HIV can
|infect certain CD4 cells and there is evidence that some mouse and
|simian fibroblast cultures encompass the CD4 antigen.  A man
...

read more »

Faster than a speeding bullet...  er, I was sleeping.

Actually I was waiting for Matthew Wiener, from Wistar to respond.  
Wistar prepared the Polio vaccine for the World Health Organisation.  My
memory is a little hazy and I appear to have lost the stuff I saved last
time this was mentioned however I don't recall any implication then that
monkey livers were used to prepare the vaccine or that this was the origin
of AIDS.

HIV and AIDS were both in existance well before the WHO Polio vaccination
campaign.

There was an implication that the HIV virus was unwittingly spread by the
Polio vaccination program.  The Wistar institute have been cleared of any
implication of malpractise.  After all it is hard to protect from the novel
and unknown.  To say that HIV was put upon humankind by this vaccine is
steering very close to {*filter*} theory territory.

There is a theory that the initial transfer of {*filter*} products between monkey
and man occurred during Malaria research between the wars.  Humans were
injected with {*filter*} from monkeys which are resistant to Malaria.  So far
no prof of this hypothesis has been found, or even comfirmation of the
experiments having occured.

The 'monkey liver in the vaccine' idea is probably the juxtaposition of
these two seperate incidents.

Derek "Put upon humankind by my mother" Tearne

--

Some of the more environmentally aware dinosaurs were worried about the
consequences of an accident with the new Iridium enriched fusion reactor.  
"If it goes off only the{*filter*}roaches and mammals will survive..." they said.