IT NOW SEEMS CERTAIN THAT HIV can be traced back to retroviruses found in certain species of African apes and monkeys. But why did these simian viruses suddenly transfer to the human species? Those who believe in a natural movement across the species barrier would be hard-pressed to explain why this transfer did not occur until the late twentieth century. Do we need to look elsewhere for the true source of HIV and AIDS?

Continue reading “From the Dust Jacket of The River”

Dust jackets from the various editions of the book.

[Article about The River: A Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS]

Contaminated polio vaccines started AIDS in Africa in the ’50s. A National Enquirer headline? No. It’s the premise of a big new book fueling an old controversy among researchers.

Could a human error in 1950s medical research be the cause of the massive global catastrophe of AIDS?

POZ Magazine, March 2000

A highly controversial book positing just such a theory has been kicking up dust in the AIDS research world since its release last September. The River: A Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS (Little, Brown and Company/Boston), written by British medical researcher and former BBC correspondent Edward Hooper, proposes that HIV emerged from a contaminated batch of experimental oral polio vaccine (OPV) administered to Africans in the late 1950s.

Continue reading “The River Runs Through It”

“Was polio vaccine the cause of AIDS?”

(Review of The River: A Journey Back to the Source of HIV and AIDS) by Matt Ridley

Daily Telegraph (UK), 1 March 2000

Bill Hamilton, the brilliant Oxford zoologist who died last week, caught his fatal disease while in the Congo. He was there in search of chimpanzee stools with which to test a radical theory about the origin of the AIDS virus. Saddened by his death, I spent the weekend reading the book that had convinced him of this theory. It has shaken me to the core.

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Review of The River: A Journey Back to the Source of HIV and Aids by Edward Hooper.

London Review of Books, Vol 22, No 5, 2 March 2000

More than a thousand pages long and the fruit of a decade’s work, The River amounts to something more than the attempt to track down the source of Aids. It is, in fact, three books rolled into one. The investigation advertised by the title is, of course, of the highest significance. It was in 1981 that attention was first drawn to the condition, as evidence mounted that gays in New York and California were falling victim to illnesses like pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP) and Kaposi’s sarcoma, rarely seen in otherwise healthy young people. A number of theories were proposed as to its origins, some unscientific (‘the wrath of God’), and others (homosexuality or Haitians) generally discredited once the human immunodeficiency virus had been isolated.

Continue reading “Tissue Wars”

Review of Hooper, E. 1999. The River: a Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS

Professor of Anthropology and Biological Sciences, Rutgers University and Adjunct Professor of Pediatrics, UMDNJ

Times Higher Educational Supplement, 18 February 2000

Many Africans and African-Americans believe that HIV and AIDS were either the direct invention of the white man–cooked up, for example, in the biological warfare labs in Beltsville, MD–or somehow preferentially directed at them by wicked, white scientists. A new book by Edward Hooper suggests that something like this may actually have happened, that the AIDS epidemic may have started when HIV was accidentally introduced into hundreds and perhaps thousands of Africans during vaccinations of over one million people, mostly children, against polio in 1958 and 1959 in Rwanda-Burundi and selected places in the Congo.

Continue reading “THES Review”

Review of The River: A Journey Back to the Source of HIV and AIDS

New Statesman, 31 January 2000

Edward Hooper, The River: a journey back to the source of HIV and AIDS, London and New York, Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1999, xxiii + 1070 pp., including index and appendices.

It has recently come to light that in Gateshead in the mid-1950s about 250,000 children were chosen for a polio vaccine trial. Parents were given minimal information before the children were called for shots of the oral vaccine. It is now clear that New Variant CJD has nothing to do with eating beef. It is the result of this trial. A few batches of the vaccine, cultured on bovine tissue, were contaminated with the virus which produces NVCJD.

Continue reading “New Statesman Review”