Origin of AIDS [letter]

In your news item about the recent Royal Society meeting Richard Horton describes the link between the origin of AIDS and an oral polio vaccine (OPV) from the Wistar Institute that was given to infants and children in the Belgian Congo from 1957-60. The centerpiece of the meeting was an OPV seed lot from the Wistar freezers that was tested for retroviral and chimpanzee components. The sample contained no trace of human or simian retrovirus and the mitochondrial DNA in the sample came from monkeys not chimpanzees. The surprising feature of these results was not the monkey or retroviral characterization of the Wistar sample but the lack of basic information about the sample itself. For example nothing was said about the polio virus in the sample. This information is important because the vaccine used in the Congo contained primarily CHAT type 1 polio virus. If the sample from the Wistar contained other strains of the virus it is unlikely to be related to the Congo vaccine. Furthermore there is evidence that viral cultures at the Wistar laboratories might have been contaminated with HeLa cells in the late 1950s. Therefore it would be helpful to know whether the tested sample contained human (as well as monkey) DNA. The Wistar committee that is responsible for investigating the OPV and AIDS hypothesis has already been misled by one poorly characterized sample from the notorious Manchester seaman. We hope that the committee (and the scientific community) will not be misled by yet another poorly characterized sample from the Wistars own freezers. (full text)