-Caveat Lector-
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [Anthrax-no] Polio
Date: Thu, 7 Oct 1999 17:20:50 EDT
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
The following information has been summarized and excerpted from
the Friday, May 8, 1992 edition of The Houston Post with the
permission of the authors, Tom Curtis and Patricia Manson.
This article is not copyrighted.
******
DO COLD, HARD AIDS FACTS LIE IN FREEZER?
Researchers looking for clues in old vials of polio vaccine
Samples of a polio vaccine recently unearthed at a research
institute on the grounds of the University of Pennsylvania here
may help solve the mystery of how AIDS was unleashed on mankind.
The polio virus material -- which could be the vaccine tested in
Africa starting in the late 1950s and suspected of being
contaminated -- was discovered during a search at The Wistar
Institute of Anatomy and Biology, according to a statement
released Thursday.
A special committee of five scientists will be informed of the
development today.
The old vaccine specimens were found among an estimated 500,0000
samples in a hunt for vials of a polio vaccine that theorists
speculate may have been accidentally contaminated with an AIDS-
causing monkey virus.
Finding and analyzing samples of those vaccine would be the first
steps toward testing the theory that modern medicine introduced
AIDS into human beings.
About March 4, the Wistar Institute said, workers began combing
through about 100 biologicals freezers and two freezer rooms
seeking vials of the experimental vaccine tested on about 325,000
people in Rwanda, Burundi and the former Belgian Congo (now
Zaire).
The institute said in the statement faxed to The Houston Post
that it is "attempting to decode the labels of some samples found
in the freezers by examining records and documents and by
conducting interviews."
Wistar said it doesn't know "at this stage" whether the samples
of "polio virus material" came from either the seed stocks used
to make vaccines for the Belgian Congo, Poland and other places
or from he vaccine lots used solely in the Belgian Congo trials.
The institute said it will present information it has collected
to the committee of outside scientists, which was formed two
months ago by Wistar director Giovannie Rovera and is meeting
today in New York City.
Wistar spokeswoman Martha Phan said she was "not at liberty to
reveal" the number of samples of old polio vaccine uncovered in
the search.
The possible role of Wistar in spawning AIDS among human beings
is largely shrouded in secrecy. The man who developed the
vaccine in question and the current director of the research
institute both declined to be interviewed for this article.
And members of the special committee charged with investigating
the matter have "taken a vow not to talk to the press until we
finish whatever we come up with," according to a committee co-
chairman.
The samples sought at Wistar were of a live oral polio vaccine
developed by Dr. Hilary Koprowski.
Koprowski is the former director of Wistar, the oldest private
non- profit biomedical research and training institute in the
nation.
He supervised the vaccine's manufacture and its experimental use
in central equatorial Africa starting 35 years ago. It was the
first live oral polio vaccine mass-tested on human beings.
If the sample found proved to be Koprowski's Congo vaccine, the
special committee will be under pressure to determine whether
that vaccine was contaminated with the AIDS virus or a precursor
virus.
Scientists most likely would use a sophisticated test called the
polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, to try to verify whether the
AIDS virus or a related virus was present. The test looks at
minute portions of genetic material.
A co-chairman of the committee, Dr. Claudio Basilico, chairman of
the Department of Microbiology at New York University School of
Medicine declined to answer most questions.
Basilico said the committee will attempt to find out whether
contaminated polio vaccines introduced AIDS into humans "if the
truth can be determined."
The committee anticipates issuing a report, he said, probably "in
less than a year."
In a recent interview with The Daily Pennsylvanian, the
University of Pennsylvania's student newspaper, Koprowski
denounced the idea that his vaccine unintentionally may have
sparked the AIDS epidemic in people. He reportedly complained the
theory was based on wholly circumstantial evidence and arguments
from non-scientists.
Likewise, Wistar officials in a press release described the idea
as "a highly speculative theory." But they acknowledged that it
has "generated a great deal of public interest and controversy."
In an interview in the March 19 issue of Rolling Stone magazine,
Koprowski said the vaccine samples in question were maintained in
freezers at Wistar. According to Dr. Warren Cheston, Wistar's
vice president for external affairs, Koprowski now says he was
misquoted or misunderstood.
Soon after the Rolling Stone issue was mailed to the magazine's
subscribers in February, Cheston said, he received a phone call
from the public relations manager of Lederle Laboratories.
Lederle is the nation's sole maker of polio vaccines and
Koprowski's former employer. Among the projects Koprowski worked
on at Lederle before leaving in 1957 to join Wistar was the
development of live oral polio vaccines.
The company's PR manager, Craig Engesser, asked whether Wistar
had the vaccine samples and if so, what it planned to do with
them, Cheston said.
Cheston said he told Engesser that Wistar officials didn't know
whether they had the samples but assumed they would test them if
they did.
He said the PR man thanked him and did not speak to him again.
Engesser declined to discuss the conversation or even confirm
that it took place.
Koprowski's lawyer, Richard Sprague of Philadelphia, said he
would not allow his client to be interviewed for this article.
In March, Koprowski told reporters that samples of his vaccine
could be obtained from the American Type Culture Collection
(ATCC), a tissue culture repository in Bethesda, Md.
However, ATCC director Dr. Robert E. Stevenson told The Post it
was impossible to determine whether samples at the collection
were actually from Koprowski's African vaccine or from vaccines
used elsewhere because the material was constantly being
"exhausted and replenished" as it was distributed to various
places at Koprowski's direction.
Stevenson said Koprowski's "production batch stuff (vaccine) from
Africa should have been archived (stored) somewhere."
Both Stevenson and Dr. Albert B. Sabin -- the developer of the
oral polio vaccine chosen for use in the United States and most
of the world -- agreed that samples from lots of Koprowski's
vaccine actually used in Africa would provide the most conclusive
evidence for or against the theory that the vaccine spawned AIDS.
Sabin said he does not believe Koprowski's vaccine sparked AIDS.
And he adamantly disputed a parallel theory recently published in
the medical journal Lancet suggesting that retrovirus
contaminants in his vaccine, which was used as a herpes treatment
in the mid-1970s, may have ignited the AIDS epidemic in New York
and California.
Sabin said that "even if the impossible occurred and you found
HIV (human immunodeficiency virus, the virus believed to cause
AIDS) in the lot that was used" in Africa, "it would mean
nothing."
The AIDS virus could not be introduced into the bloodstream
through an oral polio vaccine because it does not survive
digestion, Sabin said.
Published: Houston Post 5/8/92
Date: May 8 1992 (192 lines)
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