What we were told at the time was that the disease probably
jumped to humans as a result of Africans forgetting how to cook
their food, in this case chimpanzees, often referred to as “bush
meat,” and that the promiscuous sexual lifestyles of African
peoples (with implications of possible bestiality with primates) led
to the cross-species jump and spread of the virus among the human
population. I am now appalled that at the time we did not more
closely question these assumptions.
Since that time, there have been two competing and, in my mind,
closely related theories of how a chimpanzee retrovirus made the
jump to humans.
The first was popularized by the journalist Edward Hooper and
expanded upon in his lengthy 1999 book, The River: A Journey to the
Source of HIV and AIDS, for which he conducted more than six hundred
interviews. Of the interviews conducted, Hooper was most impressed
with evolutionary biologist Bill Hamilton, who, along with other
independent researchers such as Louis Pascal, Tom Curtis, and Blaine
Elswood, was proposing an idea that, before my work with XMRV, I
would have found quite radical. They proposed that the jump from
chimpanzees to humans came as a result of vaccine trials in the
Belgian Congo from 1957 to 1960 in which more than five hundred
common chimpanzees and bonobos (pygmy chimpanzees) were killed so
that their kidney cells and sera could be used to grow the oral
polio vaccine. This vaccine was subsequently administered to more
than a million Africans during that time period.
Hooper suggests there was great resistance to this idea, since
even in the late 1950s and early 1960s there was little public
support for the idea of using chimpanzees in such medical
experiments. In addition, the Belgian royal family was publicly
supporting the idea of wildlife conservation, and the revelation of
these actions would go against that image. Hooper believes another
reason for resistance to his idea is that if his theory was
accepted, it would shake public confidence in the medical
establishment as well as lead to multibillion-dollar class action
lawsuits for the AIDS epidemic.
This is what Edward Hooper has written on his website about the
circumstances surrounding the creation of HIV-AIDS from these
experiments and why it makes more sense than the competing bush-meat
and “cut hunter” theory.
By contrast, the oral polio vaccine (OPV) theory proposes that an experimental OPV that
had been locally prepared in chimpanzee cells and administered by
mouth, or “fed,” to nearly one million Africans in vaccine
trials staged in the then Belgian-ruled territories of the Belgian
Congo and Ruanda-Urundi between 1957 and 1960, represents the origin
of the AIDS pandemic. It provides a historically-supported
background: that between 1956 and 1959 over 500 common chimpanzees
(Pan troglodytes schweinfurthi and Pan troglodytes troglodytes) and
bonobos or pygmy chimpanzees (Pan paniscus) were housed together at
Lindi Camp (Near Stanleyville in the Belgian Congo, or DRC).
Hooper goes on to explain that the use of chimpanzees was not
technically prohibited by any conventions, but that in most
countries around the world at the time, Asian macaques were used in
polio virus preparation. As for the claim of other outbreaks, Hooper
believes they fit comfortably within the bounds of his theory:</p>
<blockquote><a name="calibre_link-251"></a>The OPV theory ascribes
the minor outbreaks of AIDS caused by other variants of HIV-1 (Group
O, Group N and the more controversial “Group P”) to other polio
vaccines (both oral and injected) that were prepared in the cells of
chimpanzees and administered in French Equatorial Africa (including
Congo Brazzaville and Gabon) in the same late fifties period. It
ascribes the outbreak of AIDS from HIV-2 (of which it maintains that
only two were epidemic outbreaks) to other polio vaccines (both oral
and injected) that were prepared in the cells of sooty mangabeys (or
other monkeys that had been caged with sooty mangabeys) and
administered in French West Africa in 1956–1960. All the other
HIV-2 groups that are claimed by bush-meat theorists have infected
just a single person, and some OPV theory supporters argue that
dead-end, non-transmissible infections such as these are the natural
fate of SIVs that infect human beings via the bushmeat route: that
unless they are introduced in an artificial manner (as via a
vaccine), they simply die out.
I find myself in complete agreement with Hooper’s analysis.
Yes, viruses can jump from one species to another, possibly by the
eating of an infected animal. But the natural process of degradation
by the digestive system, as well as cooking (even when poorly done)
is likely to inactivate most pathogens.
