acutus said:
Interesting perhaps, Mr. Bobistheow; however Mr. Hopper is a non-scientist with a 'hypothesis', only. Sincerely, Jon .
I think Preston Marx' theory about "serial passage" through dirty needles is a better one than Hopper's. Unlike Hopper, Marx is an MD, virologist specifically.
The Butare vaccines made in the 1950's may not have been up to Red Cross standards in terms of sterile conditions, as well.
Monkey kidneys were used to cultivate the vaccines because they had a low natural immunity to foreign agents, so introduced polio virus could replicate in live tissue without being killed off by the kidney's antibodies.
I can't believe that a pandemic could be caused just by occaisional monkey bites, or monkey blood getting into cuts during butchering, but the serial passage theory makes a lot more sense:
Deadly Needles
London, 2000
In the middle of the furor, Marx and Drucker quietly waited their turn.
Finally, near the end of the conference, Marx took the podium and presented their theory to the assembled researchers.
He told the conference he and Drucker believed the mass injection campaigns in Africa during the 1950s not only helped spread the AIDS virus but the widespread reuse of contaminated needles actually caused the harmless simian viruses - which usually caused weak, dead-end infections in humans - to become deadly and transmissable.
The lethal transformation occurred through a process called "serial passage, " Marx said.
That process occurs when patient A - infected with a simian virus through a splash of monkey blood in an open cut - receives an injection. When the same needle, carrying patient A's contaminated blood, is reused, the virus is transmitted to patient B.
That sequence is then repeated when the virus from patient B is transmitted to patient C by another unsterile needle, and so on.
In each patient, Marx explained, the virus rapidly adapts to its host's immune system through mutations, growing stronger before it is passed to the next patient. Through that process, the virus grows increasingly virulent until it is not only lethal but can be easily transmitted through sexual activity. The SIV has been transformed into HIV.
The process had already been witnessed in monkey experiments, Marx told his colleagues. Simian viruses became 1,000 times more pathogenic as they were "serially passaged" through as few as three monkeys.
Marx acknowledged that the serial passage of a virus in humans would be a very rare occurrence. But the huge influx of needles in Africa, particularly in the 1950s, exponentially increased the opportunity for serial passage to occur, he said.
And if the those injection campaigns had caused the virus to turn deadly, the responsibility for the AIDS epidemic rests not with a contaminated vaccine but with a different intervention of modern medicine - the introduction of the hypodermic needle.
"The consequences of massive unsterile injecting appears to be another case of unintended consequences of technological innovation," Marx said.
And he warned that if needles continue to be reused in Africa and elsewhere, new strains of viruses may cross the species barrier to humans and ignite new epidemics.
