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Origin of AIDS not accidental
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A CONTROVERSIAL theory that researchers developing polio vaccines in Africa in the 1950s accidentally triggered today's global AIDS epidemic has been dealt what could finally be a fatal blow.
Four new studies, which will be published in British and US science journals this week, have found no evidence for the main claims of the theory.
In his 1999 book The River: A Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS, British journalist Edward Hooper promulgated a disturbing theory about the origins of AIDS which threatened to capture the public's imagination.
Hooper claimed that by using chimpanzee kidney tissues infected with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) when developing an oral polio vaccine (OPV), researchers at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the United States, inadvertently contaminated their vaccine stocks with the virus.
He said that when these vaccines were tested in as many as one million people in the Congo between 1957 and 1959, they seeded the human population with HIV-1 -- the strain that most commonly causes AIDS.
Four independent research groups in Europe have now found no trace of chimpanzee tissue in any of the remaining stocks of the original vaccine, including a vial of the stock used to create the OPV tested in the Congo.
They also detected neither HIV nor its primate form and closest ancestor, simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV). Furthermore, they presented evidence that the virus emerged in human populations before the Congo vaccine trial.
Having examined samples of HIV collected in the Congo and the remaining samples of the original vaccine stock from the Wistar Institute, scientists concluded that modern-day HIV could not have originated from contamination with chimpanzee tissue in the 1950s.(Xinhua)
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