Edward Hooper's site on the Origins of AIDS
Patricia Reaney, Reuters, Philadelphia Daily News, September 12, 2000
© 2000 Philadelphia Daily News
AIDS experts yesterday dismissed a theory about the origins of the HIV virus which suggests the disease was spread to humans through a contaminated polio vaccine used in Africa in the late 1950s.
Continue reading “Vaccine-AIDS Link Dismissed Scientists say Virus Predates Polio Serum”
Nigel Hawkes, The Times (London), September 12, 2000
© 2000 Times Newspapers Limited
NEW tests have exploded the theory that the Aids epidemic was started by a contaminated polio vaccine in Africa.
Steve Sternberg, USA TODAY, September 12, 2000
© 2000 Gannett Company, Inc.
Tests of polio vaccine stored for nearly half a century undercut the notion that the AIDS virus leapt from monkeys to man through polio shots given to African children in the 1950s, experts said Monday.
Facts on File World News Digest, September 11, 2000
© 2000 Facts on File, Inc.
Claudio Basilico of the New York University School of Medicine September 11 released the results of a study that had failed to link the 1950s distribution of a polio vaccine in Africa to the beginning of the spread of AIDS. The announcement was made at the Royal Society, a London research organization. The link had been suggested most recently by a 1999 book by British journalist Edward Hooper, entitled The River, which posited that the vaccine had been cultivated using tissue from chimpanzees, the animal in which many scientists believed the AIDS virus had originated.
Continue reading “Tests Fail to Link AIDS Spread, Polio Vaccine”
EMBARGOED FOR RELEASE: 11 SEPTEMBER 2000 AT 10:15 ET US
Contact: Franklin Hoke
hoke@wistar.upenn.edu
215-898-3700
Wistar Institute
Continue reading “Wistar Institute Press Release on Testing of Polio Vaccine Samples”
By Huntly Collins, The Philadelphia Inquirer, September 10, 2000
© 2000 Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service
Was a monumental effort to conquer polio, once the leading cause of physical disability, responsible for unleashing the world AIDS pandemic, which has stricken 53 million people, most of them in Africa?
Continue reading “Scientists to Debate Whether Polio Trial Triggered AIDS Epidemic”
Huntly Collins, Contra Costa Times (California), September 10, 2000
© 2000 Contra Costa Times
Was a monumental effort to conquer polio, once the leading cause of physical disability, responsible for unleashing the world AIDS pandemic, which has stricken 53 million people, most of them in Africa?
THE CHARGE: That what became the Aids virus was passed from chimp to man during experiments in the Congo to find a cure for polio. THE JURY: The world’s leading Aids scientists, gathering in London next week to hear evidence at the Royal Society. THE VERDICT: will once and for all clear up one of medicine’s greatest mysteries.
By Steve Connor
The Independent (London), 8 September 2000, Friday Review p. 1.
Newsweek, September 6, 2000, Newsweek Web Exclusive © 2000 Newsweek
Medical conferences are fairly predictable affairs: a lot of hypotheses, an onslaught of data and, for the most part, congeniality-at least outwardly. But last week’s gathering on the origin of AIDS at London’s posh Royal Society-complete with afternoon tea-took on the excited and at times contentious tenor of a courtroom trial. On one side, Edward Hooper, author of “The River: A Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS,” who believes that the virus was most likely introduced into humans through an experimental polio vaccine given in Africa in the late 1950s. On the other, scientists Hilary Koprowski and Stanley Plotkin who created the vaccine at Philadelphia’s Wistar Institute. Hooper’s presence as a non-scientist amidst hundreds of medical experts was remarkable, but the gravest implication of the theory is impossible to ignore: scientific culpability for a plague that has killed 18 million worldwide. “He deserves,” says one of the conference organizers, “a hearing.”
Observer, Sunday 9 July 2000
World scientists gather in Durban today to discuss the epidemic sweeping the continent. But still we don’t know how it began. Edward Hooper returns to Uganda where 14 years ago he first charted the scale of the calamity. His fears have been confirmed, he argues: we unwittingly sparked the horror with a contaminated polio vaccine