Wistar cleared of starting AIDS virus

After months of debate, Philadelphia's Wistar Institute was effectively cleared this week of responsibility for the spread of the AIDS virus. A prestigious group of scientists reported that the disease was not traceable to a polio vaccine administered by the Institute four decades ago. The findings -- released during a special meeting of the Royal Society of London -- refute the claims of British journalist Edward Hooper, who wrote last year that the virus was originally transmitted via a tainted oral polio vaccine administered to African children by Wistar doctors in the 1950s. "There is nothing in the results from these tests to support the theory that HIV [the AIDS virus] entered the human population during the late 1950s polio virus clinical trials in Africa," said Claudio Basilico, chairman of microbiology at New York University and head of the Wistar committee that oversaw testing of the samples. The meeting of the Royal Society -- recognized by many as the world's leading authority on issues of scientific validity -- was called to discuss whether or not the disease jumped from chimpanzees to humans when the oral polio vaccine was administered to nearly 250,000 children in the former Belgian Congo between 1957 and 1960. In Hooper's 1999 book The River: A Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS, the former BBC stringer offers circumstantial evidence pointing toward the possibility that the disease originated in the Wistar labs. But the vast majority of evidence provided by the scientists in London this week seemed to debunk most of Hooper's claims. Citing tests conducted by a trio of independent laboratories in the United States, Germany and France, the assembly in London directed the focus of research toward the theory that HIV originated when a hunter contracted the disease while butchering a chimp and cutting himself. Hooper responded strongly to the very vocal opposition to his claims. "There is substantial and growing evidence for the polio vaccine hypothesis," Hooper said. "Most significant is the fact that there are two smoking guns that have emerged in the last two months." "Chimp kidneys were being routinely extracted, and in large numbers, by the Wistar researchers and their collaborators in at least two different places in central Africa in the late 1950s, according to... three different witnesses," he added. Wistar officials were quick to dismiss Hooper's defense as scientifically unsound. "Mr. Hooper made significant mistakes in reporting where vaccination was done," said Stanley Plotkin, one of the vaccine's developers and now a Penn emeritus professor of microbiology. "In general, the epidemiology of AIDS is consistent with sexual transmission but does not agree with the polio hypothesis," Plotkin added. Other medical experts voiced fundamentally different concerns about the Hooper claims, saying that his message could have the effect of scaring people away from crucial immunizations. "It really is enormously important to get this thing out and over with, basically because it casts a shadow on the whole idea that its safe to be immunized," said Penn Microbiology Professor Helen Davies, who also heads the undergraduate residential program on infectious diseases. "Having anything go through the Royal Society is tops in the world as far as science," Davies added. "It basically ends the issue." The Associated Press contributed to this article.