AIDS Origins

Senegal; WHO Rejects Claim That AIDS Came From Polio Vaccine

Panafrican News Agency, Africa News, September 13, 2000

© 2000 AllAfrica, Inc

DAKAR, Senegal (PANA) – The World Health Organisation has refuted a theory that HIV, the virus which causes the incurable disease AIDS, was spread to the general population by an experimental polio vaccine used in Central Africa in the 1950s.

Continue reading “WHO Rejects Claim That AIDS Came From Polio Vaccine”

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.

Continue reading “HIV’s Link to Polio Vaccine Doubted”

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.

Continue reading “Tests Discredit Chimp Theory on HIV”

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”

By Lawrence K. Altman, The New York Times, September 12, 2000

© 2000 The New York Times Company

Tests have failed to support a theory that the worldwide AIDS epidemic was touched off because an experimental oral polio vaccine used in Africa more than 40 years ago was made from chimpanzee tissue, scientists reported yesterday in London.

Continue reading “Tests Fail to Support Theory on AIDS and Role of Chimpanzees and Vaccine”

Statement of the Hypothesis that an Experimental Polio Vaccine was Origin of HIV

Contemporary Women’s Issues, September 12, 2000

Theory suggests that an experimental polio vaccine introduced in Central Africa in the 1950s may have exposed the general population to the HIV virus

© 2000 World Health Organization

Continue reading “Statement of the Hypothesis”

Does fresh evidence prove western researchers unleashed HIV by experimenting on chimps in Africa?

Guardian (UK), Tuesday 12 September 2000

James Meek, science correspondent

The disturbing and fiercely disputed theory that the Aids virus was unleashed accidentally by western medical researchers in Africa in the 1950s gained new impetus yesterday, with the emergence of fresh witness testimony about the use of chimpanzees in an African mass vaccination trial.

Continue reading “New Row Over Origin of AIDS Virus”

AIDS:Tests Fail to Link AIDS Spread, Polio Vaccine

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”