Origins of AIDS virus strains traced to gorillas
Publish Date: Mar 03, 2015
WASHINGTON - Two of four strains of the virus that can cause AIDS come from gorillas in southwestern Cameroon, an international team of scientists reported in studies published Monday in the United States.
The new information means that researchers now know the origins of all strains of the HIV virus that occur in people.
HIV (HIV-1) has at least four strains. Known as Groups M, N, O and P, each one had its own origin -- from ape to man, on at least four separate occasions.
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Groups M and N were known to have come from chimpanzees in Cameroon. But until now the origin of the O and P strains had been unknown.
Results of the study led by Martine Peeters, a virologist at France's Research and Development Institute (IRD) and the University of Montpellier, appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
HIV-1's Group M is the most widely spread, behind the greatest part of the epidemic with more than 40 million people now infected around the world.
Group P has only been detected in two people so far. And Group O has been found in central and western Africa, infecting about 100,000.
The breakthrough was made possible thanks to genetic samples from chimpanzees and gorillas from Cameroon, Gabon, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
"From this study and others that our team has conducted in the past it has become clear that both chimpanzees and gorillas harbor viruses that are capable of crossing the species barrier to humans and have the potential to cause major disease outbreaks," Peeters said.
"Understanding emerging disease origins is critical to gauge future human infection risks," she added.
Since 1981, about 78 million people have been infected by HIV, which destroys immune cells and leaves the body exposed to tuberculosis, pneumonia and other opportunistic diseases.
Thirty-nine million have died, according to UN estimates.
The team of scientists is from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Montpellier, the University of Edinburgh, and other institutions.
Debunking The Out Of Africa
Origin Of HIV & AIDS
The Greatest Conspiracy
Story Ever Told
By Alan Cantwell © 2005
Alan Cantwell, M.D.
1-1-5
- AIDS is now more than a quarter-century old. The disease has killed 20 million people worldwide, and it is estimated that 40 million more are infected with HIV (human immunodeficiency virus), the virus that causes AIDS.
- Ask your physician where AIDS came from and he or she will probably tell you the epidemic started when monkeys or chimps in the African bush transferred the AIDS virus (HIV) to a person while butchering primate meat for food or through an animal bite. For the first two decades of the epidemic the green monkey theory of AIDS was widely heralded in the major media, and was accepted without question by leading AIDS experts and educators. The theory was so universally popular (except in Africa) that it easily became fact in the minds of most people.
- Robert Gallo, M.D., and the Green Monkey Theory
- The AIDS virus was first discovered by Robert Gallo at the National Cancer Institute in April 1984. Shortly thereafter Luc Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute in Paris claimed that he (and not Gallo) had first discovered the AIDS virus. A bitter lawsuit followed, which was finally settled privately in 1987 through the intervention of the French Premier and President Ronald Reagan. To this day, the two 'co-discoverers' of HIV continue to disagree about the origin of HIV and the birthplace of AIDS.
- In Montagnier's book, Virus (2000), he states: "The origin of the epidemic remains a mystery, and the virus seems older than the epidemic" and "it is important to distinguish between the origins of the virus and that of the (AIDS) epidemic."
- The scientific scandal provoked by Gallo's "stealing" the virus from the French, as well as the ensuing government investigations into allegations of scientific irregularities and falsification of data in Gallo's lab, undoubtedly is the reason both scientists have never received a Nobel Prize for their discovery of HIV. A highly unsympathetic account of this scientific mess is provided by Pulitzer prize-winning author John Crewdson in, Science Fictions; A Scientific Mystery, A Massive Cover-Up, and the Dark Legacy of Robert Gallo (2002).
- Because Gallo is the most powerful and influential AIDS scientist, his views on the origin of HIV/AIDS have become gospel. He first called his AIDS virus the "human T-cell leukemia/lymphoma virus" because he believed it was closely related to newly discovered cancer-causing retroviruses. The virus was quickly renamed human T-cell lymphotropic virus-3 (HTLV-3), perhaps to obscure the connection of the AIDS virus to laboratory cancer viruses, and to downplay any association between cancer (which is thought to be non-contagious) and AIDS (which is definitely a sexually-transmitted disease).
Cancer Bacteria in Kaposi's sarcoma. Arrows point to cancer microbes magnified 1000 times in a skin tumor of AIDS-related Kaposi's sarcoma in a 52 year-old, black, bisexual man. The tissue section is stained with Giemsa stain. In the insert are bacteria cultured from the KS tumor and identified as Staphylococcus epidermidis (same magnification). Note how the size and shape of the variably-sized round (coccus) forms of the bacteria are identical in size and shape to the bacteria seen in the KS cancer tumor. These bacteria in Kaposi's are similar to bacteria reported in enlarged lymph nodes in AIDS, as well as in other AIDS-damaged tissue. Similar bacteria have also been observed and reported in other forms of cancer, such as lymphoma, breast cancer, prostate cancer, and others. The finding of similar bacteria in both cancer and AIDS suggest a close relationship between these two diseases. Robert Gallo, M.D. says AIDS is an epidemic of cancer. In the 1970s the knowledge achieved by the study of cancer retroviruses helped lead to the discovery of the AIDS virus in 1984. Unfortunately, the presence of "cancer microbes" in cancer and AIDS has been totally ignored by the medical establishment. - Where did Gallo's new virus come from? In the prestigious journal Science (Jan 4, 1985) it was reported that Gallo's AIDS virus was most closely related to "slow viruses" (lentiviruses) found in sheep and goats, particularly the visna virus in sheep, which causes pneumonia, neurologic changes, and wasting. However, Gallo declared that his virus was not visna virus, but might be "another animal viruses coming into man...and this means we have to look more closely at these animals as models and these types of animal viruses. No one knows if the viruses could have stemmed from a common viral ancestor hundreds or thousands of years ago, or if a virus moved between species only decades ago from human exposure to the virus of sheep or goats."
- The idea that HIV was "closely related" to the sheep visna virus did not last long. The idea of a sheep virus infecting gay men would have undoubtedly aroused suspicion because the only place one could find visna was in research labs where visna virus had been seeded and "adapted" into various animal species, as well as into human cells, for the two decades prior to the "gay plague."
- Gallo, with the help of veterinarian Max Essex of Harvard, convinced the AIDS experts and the adoring media that AIDS came from green monkeys. In Gallo's book Virus Hunting [1991], he claims that in 1983 (a year before his discovery) Ann Giudici Fettner, a free-lance journalist who had lived in Africa, told him that the virus came from green monkeys in central Africa. In 1983 the African connection to AIDS was tenuous, and in Fettner's 1984 book, The Truth About AIDS, she never mentioned green monkeys and the African origin of AIDS. In fact, on page 44, she emphatically states: "AIDS started as an American disease."
- There are no scientific papers which uphold the green monkey theory. The monkey out of Africa theory lasted until the late 1990s when another group of American scientists claimed the virus definitely originated in a specific species of chimpanzee found in Africa.
- The green monkey theory was scientifically doomed from the very start, although that apparently did not phase the scientists who undoubtedly wanted to place the blame on the dark continent -- and take the origin of HIV out of Manhattan, where the first cases were discovered in 1979, and push the origin to the other side of the world.
- The Marriage of Cancer Research and Biowarfare in 1971
- Whatever the theoretical origin of HIV/AIDS, there is no doubt that the epidemic started a decade after scientists began "adapting" massive numbers of cancer-causing and immunosuppressive animal viruses and transferring them between various animal species in an attempt to experimentally produce cancer in the laboratory. In the process of these "species-jumping" experiments, the scientists mixed viruses together, seeded them into the bodies of various animal species, and planted them into animal and human cell cultures. In the process myriads of new, laboratory-created mutant, hybrid and recombinant viruses were created, some of which were exceedingly dangerous.
- These engineered and deadly viruses were obviously of interest to biowarfare scientists. Donald A MacArthur stated in Congressional testimony in 1969 that "molecular biology is a field that is advancing very rapidly and eminent biologists believe that within a period of 5 to 10 years it would be possible to produce a synthetic biological agent, an agent that does not exist naturally exist and for which no natural immunity could have been acquired."
- The dangers provoked by all these laboratory-created new virus were well known. At a symposium on leukemia research in 1973, Danish pathologist J Clemmesen warned that the transmissibility of these genetically -altered viral agents could cause a world epidemic of cancer if they escaped from the laboratory. (Gallo has publicly stated AIDS is an epidemic of cancer.) That same year cancer virologists convened at a conference entitled "Biohazards in Biological Research" at Asilomar, California. Despite the risks, it was decided to continue perilous animal cancer virus experimentation.
- People are often surprised to find there is a close relationship between traditional cancer virus research and biological warfare programs and experimentation. However, it is a fact that in 1971 President Richard Nixon, as part of his War On Cancer, combined the U.S. Army's biowarfare department at Ft. Detrick, Maryland, with the National Cancer Institute. The army's DNA and genetic engineering programs were coordinated into anti-cancer research and molecular biology programs. This marriage also cemented the governmental ties of cancer research to the CIA, the CDC, the World Health Organization, and private industry.
- During this same period the Special Virus Cancer Program (1968-1980), now largely and conveniently forgotten, was established to coordinate the search for cancer-causing viruses. The U.S. biological warfare program is highly secret. This secrecy also surrounds the many scientists who directly or indirectly contribute to the program. Naturally, there is no complete record of what this Virus Cancer Program has achieved or what cancer-causing and immunosuppressive animal cancer viruses were adapted for biological warfare use and for covert military testing on human populations.(For more details and 129,000 citations, go to www.google.com and type-in key words : biological warfare human experimentation.)
- A computer PUBMED search employing the key words "U.S. Army Biological Warfare Program" yields only 44 citations. One entry (PMID: 11572136) reads: "The United States began its BW program based on intelligence information and a very thorough evaluation of that information by a panel of scientists, engineers, medical personnel from a variety of areas including the military, other government agencies, industry, and the academic community. Initial efforts were directed toward defense against BW, but it soon became clear defense required a knowledge of offensive capabilities. The initial offensive studies started with a definition of what infectious organisms were available, how they could grow in quantities to support a munitions program, what kind of facilities were required, and where they could be positioned. Further studies were then initiated to design and evaluate testing sites and methodologies to evaluate the weapons. During all of these phases, concurrent medical and safety programs were studied, emphasized, and implemented. These studies resulted in the development of a number of vaccines, toxoids, treatments, therapies, and facility personnel management. The overall conclusion was that BW, offensive and defensive, was possible, and efficiencies could be obtained. The work accomplished by this group of very dedicated military and civilian personnel at military installations, universities, research institutes, and industrial organizations presented truly a combined operation with numerous achievements. Many of the detailed achievements were published in the open scientific, peer-reviewed journals, and many patents were obtained. The current defensive program is breaking new scientific ground and there is evidence indicating that very rapid detection and identification of BW agents is possible and will be instrumented."
- Is it "conspiracy theory" to question whether a virus "closely related" to HIV was created in any of the many laboratories contributing to the Special Virus Cancer Program and its connection to biowarfare research during the 1970s? Could covert human testing of classified biowarfare agents explain the exclusive "introduction" of HIV into gay men, the most hated minority in America, via the government-sponsored experimental hepatitis B experiments that began in Manhattan in New York City in 1978 -- the year before the onset of the "gay plague."
- The American Origin of AIDS in 1979
- In 1979 the first young white gay men to come down with "gay-related immunodeficiency disease" was reported to the CDC. For the first year of the epidemic all the men were from Manhattan. They were all defined as young, predominantly white, previously healthy, well-educated and promiscuous.
- The Manhattan men were similar in profile to the 1,083 gay men who signed up for the hepatitis B experiment conducted at the New York Blood Center, also located in Manhattan. The experimental vaccine was developed in chimpanzees. The injections began in November 1978, and were concluded a year later. Similar vaccine experiments in gay men were undertaken in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Denver, St. Louis and Chicago, beginning in March 1980 and continued until October 1981, a few months after the epidemic had become "official." (For more details, google: the hepatitis B vaccine experiment.)
- AIDS became official in the U.S. in June 1981. At the time AIDS was unknown in Africa, and the epidemic did not begin there until autumn 1982 at the earliest. After Gallo discovered HIV in April 1984, an HIV blood test was developed and was used on the stored gay blood specimens deposited at the Center as part of the ongoing experiment and follow-up. In 1980, a year before the epidemic became official, already 20% of the men's blood in the experiment were HIV-positive. By 1983, 30% of the men were positive; by 1984, 40%.
- AIDS scientists repeatedly claim HIV was lurking in Africa for decades, centuries, even millennia, before the epidemic. But there was no "incubation period" in America.
- As soon as large numbers of gay people came out of the closet and signed up for government experiments, the gay community was doomed. Not only was one virus (HIV) "introduced" into the homosexual population, but two additional "mycoplasma" bacteria-like agents and a new herpes virus as well. In addition, I wrote in books and medical journals that "cancer-causing bacteria" were also operative in AIDS, but all my research linking AIDS to cancer remains ignored by the AIDS establishment. (For full details and 458 citations: google: "alan cantwell" +bacteria +AIDS.)
- "Gay Cancer": A mystery wrapped in an enigma
- Three years before HIV was discovered, my research uncovering bacteria in Kaposi's sarcoma was published. KS became widely known as the "gay cancer" associated with AIDS. In the late 1970s, as a dermatologist, I studied the cancerous tissue of three elderly, presumably straight married men with KS, a very rare skin cancer that few physicians had ever seen. I identified bacteria in the cancerous tissue; and bacteria were cultured from skin biopsies. When the first gay men with KS appeared in my office, I studied their skin tumors for bacteria. A PUBMED computer search lists 7 of my research papers published in medical journals between the years 1981-1986 showing bacteria in the KS lesions of straight and gay men with KS and AIDS, in the enlarged lymph nodes of "AIDS-related complex", and in two autopsy studies showing bacteria in the internal organs of a straight man who died of KS before the epidemic, and a gay man who died of KS and AIDS.
My bacterial research showed a close relationship of AIDS to cancer. This research is included in my books, AIDS:The Mystery & the Solution (1984), and The Cancer Microbe (1990). When Gallo was asked about my KS research in a published interview by James D'Eramo in 1984, he ignored the question. When asked why only homosexuals were the first victims of AIDS, he replied: "Because they were exposed." To this day Gallo and Montagnier refuse to acknowledge any aspect of this research.
- In 1993, Shyh-Ching Lo of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology reported the finding of 2 different infectious agents in the blood, urine and KS tumors of AIDS patients. At first, he thought the microbes were viruses, but later determined they were actually very small forms of bacteria called "mycoplasmas." After Lo's discovery, the Army quickly took out patents on his infectious agents, which he calls Mycoplasma fermentens and M. penetrans. My KS research was never mentioned in any of his papers.
- In 1994, a new infectious and sexually-transmitted herpes virus called "human herpes virus-8" was proclaimed to be the agent causing all pre-AIDS and AIDS-related KS. This virus is now widely accepted as the sole cause. I thought it rather strange that there was never any evidence that KS was transmissible before AIDS, and that a "new" virus could cause a rare cancerous disease that has been around since the 1870s.
- Montagnier thinks mycoplasmas might be a necessary "co-factor" which accelerates the progression of HIV infection in AIDS patients. He also believes antibiotic therapy along with antiviral therapy is better treatment for AIDS. Where did these new mycoplasmas come from? Where did HIV come from? Offering homophobic explanations and no evidence in his Virus book, the French virologist theorizes that American gay tourists brought back these agents from Africa to the U.S.
- Evidence of blood infection with the new KS human herpes virus-8 is now present in as many as 40% of men with prostate cancer. In Texas, 15% of normal blood donors now test positive for the virus. This means the virus is in the American blood supply; and blood is not screened for the virus. Where did the "new" herpes virus come from? A "close relative" is the Herpes saimiri virus of squirrel monkeys, a virus that was extensively passed around in the Special Virus Cancer Program.
- Chimpanzees and the Polio Vaccine Theory of AIDS
In 1999 the publication of The River: A Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS, by journalist Edward Hooper, received widespread media attention. Hooper theorizes that HIV was introduced into Africans via chimp virus-contaminated polio vaccine programs in the late 1950s. His massive book does not adequately explain why it took 30 years for the epidemic to appear in Africa, nor how a sexually-transmitted disease in black Africans in the early 1980s could have transformed itself into a white gay man's disease in New York City in the late 1970s. Furthermore, there are no HIV-positive tissue or blood specimens from Africa from the 1960s and 1970s, and no proven cases of AIDS either, to indicate HIV was "incubating" in the African population. Hooper quickly dismisses the claims of Robert Strecker, the first physician whistle-blower of man-made AIDS, as well as the man-made research in my own two books on the man-made origin: AIDS & The Doctors of Death, and Queer Blood.
- By predating his polio vaccine theory back to the late 1950s, Hooper greatly simplified his theory of AIDS origin. He ignores all the primate/simian viruses that were placed into human tissue in the 60s and 70s, and all those genetically altered viruses for cancer research, vaccine research, and secret biological warfare.
- The chimp in the freezer at Fort Detrick
- On February 1, 1999 Lawrence K Altman, M.D, longtime AIDS-writer for The New York Times, dutifully reported "the riddle of the origin of the AIDS virus has apparently been solved." A team of researchers, headed by Beatrice Hahn at the University of Alabama, performed viral studies on three chimps in the African wild and studied the frozen remains of a chimp, discovered by accident in a freezer at the Army's biowarfare center at Fort Detrick. The chimp had tested positive for HIV in 1985. On the basis of this research, Hahn declared that a common subspecies of chimp (Pan troglodytes troglodytes) was the animal source of the virus "most closely" related to HIV. In a media blitz U.S. government scientists presented a phylogenetic ancestral "family tree" of primate viruses (which few people could understand) to prove that HIV was genetically descended from a chimp virus in the African bush.
- Hahn theorizes the epidemic could have started when a hunter became infected by cutting himself while butchering chimp meat. Back in the 1980s Hahn worked in Gallo's lab, and like Gallo she ignores the entire history of animal cancer virus laboratory transfers in the decades preceding AIDS, as well as the fact that chimp kidneys were transplanted into humans back in the 1960s in New York City. Another big problem is that after scientists pump viruses into captive lab chimps in laboratories in the U.S. and Africa, they sometimes release them back into the wild. Obviously, the mix of lab animal viruses with viruses in the wild make the determination of viral "ancestry" somewhat iffy.
- AIDS scientists totally accepted Hahn's notion that HIV jumped species from chimps to humans back in the 1930s to start the epidemic. The media again explained this was the first time that primate viruses had jumped species "naturally," again failing to mention all the millions of people around the world who had the primate/simian SV40 virus injected into them along with their polio shot.
- How accurate and meaningful is the ancestry of all these animal retroviruses? Do words used by scientists to compare different viruses, such as "closely related" and "distally related" (meaning related far from the point of origin) really tell us how a suspected primate virus like HIV got into the human population? For example, it is widely reported in scientific circles that no two HIV viruses are exactly alike. This is because HIV mutates readily and takes on some of the molecular components of the cells it invades. When it comes to viral "relationships" the only absolutely identical HIV viruses in scientific history was the virus presented by Gallo as his discovery, and the virus presented by Montagnier as his discovery. The genetic evidence indicated it was impossible for these two scientists to have discovered identical viruses on two different continents, even though Gallo insisted his virus was not the same as Montagnier's. Thus, the lawsuit.
- The moral of this story is: If the two most highly respected AIDS scientists cannot agree on the ancestry of identical twin viruses, then how can we be sure when they tell us which virus is related to which virus -- particularly when many engineered laboratory viruses are not even recorded and entered into so-called virus banks or registries which are used to compare the genetic make-up of "known" viruses. Let's face it, if your old ancestors are not recorded in a book somewhere, you will never find them as ancestors.
- The Origin of AIDS Conference, London, 2000
- In October 2000 the Royal Society of London held a two-day conference on the origins of HIV. Needless to say, the man-made theory was not discussed. One professor emphatically declared: "All human infectious diseases have an animal origin." Hooper's polio theory was totally discredited; and Hahn's new chimp theory, dating HIV back to the 1930s, was acclaimed.
- The "Last Word" at the conference was that "all human viral infections were initially zoonotic (animal) in origin. Animals will always provide a reservoir for viruses that could threaten human populations in the future." The scientists predicted: "There is still a myriad of current unknown viruses in animal populations on land, sea, and air with the potential to cause human disease." But what about the millions of dangerous virus created in animal laboratories? That was never considered.
- A person cannot contract AIDS from a monkey or chimp
- In the July 2000 issue of Lancet, virologist and primatologist Preston Marx states: "There is no evidence that a person can contract AIDS from a monkey or chimpanzee". According to Marx, research shows humans were infected with SIV (simian immunodeficiency virus) in Africa and that these SIV infections were the root origin of HIV. Therefore SIV is the monkey ancestor virus of HIV. And Marx has no doubt that HIV originated from SIV in African non-human primates.
- AIDS educators often claim that AIDS is a "zoonosis", meaning a disease of animals that can be transmitted to humans, but Marx says this assumption is incorrect. AIDS as a zoonosis would mean that humans had contracted not only an SIV infection from a monkey or a chimp, but that they also eventually became sick with AIDS from the monkey virus infection. We have not established that AIDS is a zoonosis (meaning a disease people catch from monkeys). He further declares "We do not know what launches animal viruses to become epidemic in humans. There may be a social, viral-genetic or immunologic basis for new epidemics. We do not have this answer for the AIDS epidemic, but we do know that HIV originated from simian species."
- In a more recent October 2004 article "AIDS as a zoonosis? Confusion over the origin of the virus and the origin of the epidemic", Marx and his colleagues further speculate that HIV (derived from a primate) in the 1950s in Africa could have been made more dangerous and transmissible by dirty needles used in vaccine programs, as well as contaminated blood transfusions. The repeated passage from human-to-human (so called "serial passage") via SIV virus-contaminated needles could have transformed a harmless SIV in humans to the deadly and genetically-changed HIV virus causing AIDS.
- Human exposure to SIV is thousands of years old, but AIDS merged only in the 20th century. Marx never suggests that contaminated vaccines, rather than needles, could have initiated the African epidemic. However, if AIDS does not qualify as a zoonosis, I interpret this to mean that Hahn's "cut hunter theory" could not account for the explosion of HIV/AIDS in Africa in the 1980s. Finally, Marx's team suggests that more "research is needed to understand the processes by which animal viruses cause sustained human-to-human transmission, epidemics and even pandemics. Much is known about emerging viruses, but almost nothing is known about emerging viral diseases."
- WHO Murdered Africa?
- Apparently forgotten, ignored, or unknown by Marx was a similar vaccine and needle scenario reported on May 11, 1987, on the front-page of The London Times, entitled "Smallpox vaccine triggered AIDS virus." Science editor Pierce Wright suggested that African AIDS was a direct result of the World Health Organization's smallpox eradication program conducted in the 1970s. The smallpox vaccine allegedly awakened a "dormant" AIDS virus infection in the black population. Gallo was quoted as saying, "The link between the WHO program and the epidemic is an interesting and important hypothesis. I cannot say that it actually happened, but I have been saying for some years that the use of live vaccines such as that used for smallpox can activate a dormant infection such as HIV (the AIDS virus)."
- The Times report is one of the most important stories ever printed on the AIDS epidemic; yet the story was killed and never appeared in any major U.S. newspaper or magazine. However, the report is widely circulated on the internet as evidence to suggest that AIDS appeared in Africa via accidental or deliberate vaccine contamination with the AIDS virus. (Google: WHO murdered Africa).
- Kenyan ecologist and biologist Wangari Maathai was obviously aware of this vaccine connection when she won the Nobel Peace Prize in October 2004, and shocked reporters by claiming the AIDS virus was a deliberately created biological agent developed by evil-minded scientists and released in Africa to cause mass extermination of blacks.
- In Magic Shots [1982], Allan Chase claims that during the years 1966-1977, the WHO utilized "200,000 people in forty countries -- most of them non-doctors trained by seven hundred doctors and health professionals from over seventy participating countries -- spent $300 million, and used forty million bifurcated vaccinating needles to administer 24,000 million (2.4 billion) doses of smallpox vaccine." This is also proof of extensive needle re-use.
- There is absolutely no evidence to show that large numbers of African blacks were "incubating" HIV, or any other primate/simian virus before the outbreak. This is why the out of Africa idea is theory and not fact.
- Despite this lack of evidence, the monkey/chimp and primate/simian origin of HIV/AIDS is a well-accepted scientific theory. In contrast, the man-made "introduction" of HIV in the late 1970s is condemned as "conspiracy theory". Although taboo, the man-made theory refuses to go away, and is alive and well on the internet. A google search, using the key words "man made origin of AIDS," will elicit 1,220,000 citations to various web sites.
- HIV: Out of Africa? Or out of a virus laboratory?
- Precise answers to how AIDS originated depends on which "expert" you ask. Montagnier points to the United States and gay men as the source of the virus. Could the virus have been transmitted from chimpanzees to humans? Montagnier says yes. But, he adds, humans could have transmitted the virus to the chimpanzees! How could humans have transmitted the virus to chimps? Unfortunately, the Frenchman did not elaborate on this.
- Could HIV be a primate/simian virus originating in a virus laboratory ? Such questions are never seriously proposed or answered by virologists. However, well-known to insiders are the embarrassing contamination problems with primate viruses which have plagued Gallo's lab at the NCI and Essex's lab at Harvard.
- A case in point is Gallo's reported 1975 "discovery" of a "new" and "human" virus reported in scientific journals as "HL-23." This virus was eventually proven to be not one, but three different ape viruses (gibbon-ape virus, simian sarcoma virus and baboon endogenous virus). Gallo claims he has no idea how these viruses contaminated his research.
- Essex, who along with Gallo heavily promoted the erroneous green monkey theory, had similar woes. In 1986 he announced the discovery of a "new" human AIDS virus (HTLV-4). This "human" virus bore a striking similarity to a monkey retrovirus known as STLV-3. In February 1988, the mystery was solved. Essex's new "human" HTLV-4 virus turned out to be a monkey virus that accidentally contaminated Essex's human blood samples. The source of the monkey contamination was traced back to blood samples from a monkey that was experimentally infected by an AIDS-like virus at the New England Regional Primate Research Center in Southborough, Massachusetts. Carol Mulder of the University of Massachusetts Medical School cautioned: "This episode should serve as a strong warning for all virologists to check any newly discovered viruses against viruses present in the laboratory."
- In the decade before AIDS broke out in gay men, Essex created "cat AIDS" in a series of experiments. In 1974, chimpanzee AIDS was also created deliberately by feeding heavily virus-contaminated cows' milk to newborn chimps. For the very first time, veterinarians were able to produce leukemia in chimps, as well as a lung infection, later known as the "gay pneumonia" of AIDS. As Montagnier should be aware, human cancerous tissue and blood was routinely injected into primates as part of the Special Virus Cancer Program. Mysterious AIDS-like illnesses also occurred in primate laboratories a few years before AIDS. And chimp viruses also jumped species back in the 1960s when chimp kidneys were experimentally transplanted into humans.
- We are informed that the AIDS epidemic is the result of a primate virus jumping species for the first time. However, polio vaccines given to millions of people in the 50s and 60s were heavily contaminated with a cancer-causing monkey virus called SV-40 (simian virus 40). Over the decades various studies indicate this virus is implicated in several forms of human cancer, although government scientists continue to deny any association. For a complete analysis of this polio vaccine contamination, read (or google) The Virus and the Vaccine [2004].
- The man-made theory of AIDS proclaims that HIV was introduced into American gays and African blacks via vaccine programs. Why is this theory deemed paranoia by the media and the AIDS establishment? Why is discussionnot allowed? Why have scientists suppressed the extensive history of animal cancer virus transfer in the decade before AIDS?
- Is there a scientific conspiracy to get scientists off the hook by blaming monkeys in the bush, and gays and Africans, for the millions of death brought about by the "introduction" of HIV into the world population? Of course there is. That's why it's The Greatest Conspiracy Story Ever Told.
- - Alan Cantwell has writing extensively on the origin of AIDS and cancer for the past two decades. He is the author of AIDS: The Mystery and the Solution; AIDS and the Doctors of Death; Queer Blood, and The Cancer Microbe, all published by Aries Rising Press, Los Angeles, CA, and available through internet sources. Email:alancantwell@sbcglobal.net
MONKEY BUSINESS OVER AIDS By Baffour Ankomah New African April 1998
Just as we thought the African green monkey theory about the origin of AIDS was dead and buried, American researchers have resurrected it by publishing "new evidence" in February which sought to pin the origins of AIDS on the African monkey via a "1959 blood sample" taken from "a man in Central Africa". But is this any more reliable than previous evidence? Baffour Ankomah has put it under the miscroscope and found it wanting.
The world media had a field day when the story broke on Wednesday 4 February. When AIDS made the fatal leap from ape to man, said the headline in The Times [of London].
Written by the paper's science editor Nigel Hawkes, the story said in part: "The point at which AIDS made its fatal leap from ape to man can now be more accurately fixed after the discovery of the virus in a blood sample taken from a man in Central Africa in 1959.
"The original source of the HIV-1 virus, responsible for the bulk of the epidemic, was almost certainly a chimpanzee, from which closely related viruses have been isolated.
"How HIV-1 got from chimpanzees to man is not known. Close contact with blood - perhaps while butchering a chimpanzee to eat - could have been the cause. It would have to happen only once, since the evidence is that the AIDS epidemic started with a single human case."
It was Professor Max Essex of the Harvard University who first declared in the mid-1980s that the AIDS virus had jumped over to man from the "African green monkey". Yet years later, it was proved that "the first AIDS-like viruses in monkeys had been found by Max Essex in macaques, a monkey species primarily from Southeast Asia, not Africa", New African reported in 1990.
Max Essex himself, shamed by his false theory, recanted years later and admitted that the HIV virus and the monkey virus were so different from each other that none of them "could have been the ancestor of the other in a historical past".
Now the debate has moved on. If the African green monkey is not the culprit, it must "certainly" be the African chimpanzee which, when being butchered for food, gave the virus to the man butchering it.
"It would have had to happen only once, since the evidence is that the AIDS epidemic started with a single human case", The Times science editor Nigel Hawkes wrote on 5 February 1998.
But neither Nigel Hawkes nor the American researchers could tell who this "single human case" actually was. "A man from Central Africa" was all they could conjure, leaving people to assume that "this man" coming from Central Africa could only be African. Thus "proving" that AIDS did indeed originate from Africa.
But this assumption glosses over the fact that Africa has never been an island where no foreigners had travelled or lived before. Thus, the "man from Central Africa" (said to be dead) could have been anybody - African, foreigner etc - unless the Americans are saying the blood sample has been proven to be specifically African.
Even then, how could one vouch that "this African man" did not contract the virus from one of the millions of foreigners who visited or lived in Central Africa before 1959.
As Dr Rosalind J. Harrison, the Australian-born consultant ophthalmic surgeon working in Britain wrote in New African in June 1997 (p36-39): "It is the historical inaccuracies [about the African origin of AIDS] that are more spectacular. For many centuries before the Portuguese sailed around the Cape [of Good Hope], powerful West African kingdoms conducted trade across the Sahara to the Mediterranean, and every year many thousands of West Africans made the pilgrimage to Mecca.
"On the East African seaboard, there were city states that flourished on trade between the Central and Southern African kingdoms such as Monamatapa in Zimbabwe, and Asia as far as Ming dynasty China.
"With the advent of the Portuguese began 400 years of the African slave trade, during which many millions of Africans were transported to the New World and Europe, and when African women were regularly raped from the time of capture.
"Following the demise of the slave trade came the scramble for Africa, when almost the entire continent was colonised by the European powers.
"If AIDS was the cause of a tumour as common as Kaposi's sarcoma in equatorial Africa, the disease would have spread to the rest of the world hundreds, if not thousands, of years earlier.
"Tourists from the US in the mid-1970s as the means by which AIDS reached America [is] breathtakingly naive... The Simian Immunodeficiency Virus (SIV) that have been isolated from monkeys are, like all other retroviruses, species specific - ie, in nature no monkey retrovirus normally infects a human or indeed a different species of monkeys, and there is no monkey reservoir for the HIV...
"[Yet] undeterred, scientists have estimated that SIV mutated into HIV in the last few decades. Even if such an improbable event did occur, given the colonial ties and trading links between Africa and Europe, the virus would have caused an epidemic in Europe at the same time as, or before, the epidemic in the US. Yet all the documented evidence points to an epidemic beginning in America and from there spreading to Europe."
Such common sense apparently cuts no ice with American establishment researchers and the gullible journalists who feed on their every word.
Believing absolutely in their evidence that AIDS did start with "the 1959 man" after eating an African monkey, the American researchers who made the February announcement went further to suggest in the medical journal Nature "that mass immunisation campaigns in Africa by the WHO helped to spread the disease".
This forced Jose Esparza, the vaccine development adviser for UNAIDS (the UN body that took over the WHO's AIDS programme) to defend the WHO: "There has been no new evidence," he said, "to suggest that HIV was significantly spread by the smallpox vaccination campaign. I still believe that the big social changes of the 1950s brought the virus out of the [African] jungle and into the cities. People moved more, tribal customs changed and there was more sexual contact."
So Africans began to have more sex in the 1950s?
Nigel Hawkes, The Times' science editor, suggests the virus may have infected human beings for the first time "probably in the late 1940s or early 1950s". And to great effect, he adds:
"The disease was established for decades in Africa before it was recognised as a worldwide threat."
And yet, the many Europeans and Americans who flocked to Africa for all these "decades" and had sexual contact with African women (and sometimes men), did not contract the virus until AIDS started killing Americans in the 1980s.
Back to this famous sample, there is incontrovertible evidence showing that samples frozen for too long have a high tendency of giving false positive results.
As Dr Rosalind Harrison wrote in New African in June 1997: "Evidence that false positivity was a major problem in both stored serum samples and samples taken for population studies for HIV in Africa was available from the mid-1980s, but has been largely ignored.
"Claims that early tests were unreliable but those used now can be trusted are also untenable."
Writing about the same "1959 sample" in the medical journal The Lancet in May 1986, 12 American doctors and scientists led by Dr A. J. Nahmias of the Department of Pediatrics, Emory University School of Medicine (Atlanta) admitted the following:
"The place of origin of [HIV] is controversial but most workers have suggested Africa. Most cogent to the issue has been the isolation of a related virus from the African green monkey... Because of the importance of this issue, we decided to test 1,213 plasmas obtained originally for immunogenetic studies from various parts of Africa, of which 818 had been obtained as far back as 1959.
"We appreciate that enzyme immunoessay (EIA) antibody tests on sera or plasma frozen for many years can lead to false positive results. We report here our approach to this problem and evidence for antibodies to HTLV-III [later renamed HIV-1] or a closely related virus in one plasma from Leopoldville (now Kinshasa, Zaire) in 1959."
Dr Nahmias' group said they used every sophisticated testing device available at the time - including Abbott EIA kits, direct immunofluorescence assay, Western blotting with peroxidase-labelled reagent, and Western blot with radiolabelled protein. They reported:
"According to the manufacturers, any specimen that yields an optical density (OD) on the Abbott EIA that is equal to or above the cut-off value is positive. Of the 818 plasma obtained in 1959, 752 (ie 92%) were positive using this definition while only 10% of the 277 plasmas collected in the Congo in 1982 were positive.
"While this work was in progress, we learned from Dr Schable that sera obtained by the American Red Cross which have an OD below 7x cut-off value with the Abbott kit are rarely confirmed as positive.
"So we concentrated on trying to confirm tests on plasma with an OD above 3x cut-off. None of the 1967 (Mozambique) or 1982 plasma, but 21 of the 1959 (Central Africa) plasmas fitted this category. A 10% sample of plasmas with ODs in the range 1x to 3x were tested by immunofluorescence, and all were negative.
"The 21 specimens were submitted to immunofluorescent microscopy and Western blot ensymatic immunoassay. Only one was positive by both tests. This plasma had an OD more than 7x cut-off value...
"We appreciate that when testing plasmas that were more than 25 years old, we would need to confirm any ELISA positive specimen by as many means as possible because of the risk of false positive reactions. Confirmatory tests were performed on all ratios above 3...
"We have demonstrated that at least one individual from Central Africa had been exposed to a virus similar to [HIV] more than a quarter of a century ago. THE IDENTITY OF THE DONOR IS NO LONGER KNOWN [emphasis New African's].
"Our results also suggest that the prevalence of [HIV] was very low in Central Africa in 1959. No evidence of the infection was found in sera taken in rural areas of the Belgian Congo or South Africa (1959), Mozambique (1969), the Congo (1982)."
So what evidence did Nigel Hawkes, The Times' science editor, base his assertion that "the disease was established for decades in Africa before it was recognised as a worldwide threat".
One could also ask why Dr Nahmias group stopped short of a definitive identification of the donor of the "1959 sample". By saying "the identity of the donor is no longer known", means that at some point in time his identity was known. What happened to his records? Were they wiped out? By whom? And for what purpose?
Even if the physical records no longer exist, surely somebody must have read them and known who the donor was. Was he black-African, Arab-African, white-African or Asian-African? Or was he an expatriate? Did anybody know him? Where are these people now? Can they be reached?
If the donor can be identified and his lifestyle examined, it will help greatly in tracing the origins of AIDS. In the absence of this "credible trace", any evidence pinning the origins of AIDS on Africa will remain mere speculation.
As far back as 1991, there was evidence, again published in America, showing that frozen samples were as reliable as the performances of the English Cricket team.
In the July-August 1991 issue of the US Public Health Reports, seven American doctors and researchers from the Public Health Service and the National Institute on Aging's Gerontology Research Centre, led by Dr W. Robert Lange of Baltimore, concluded definitively that frozen samples were hugely unreliable.
Their findings came at the end of a study tracing some American drug addicts whose blood samples, frozen since 1971-72, had tested positive for HIV in 1985. Dr Lange's group reported:
"Serum specimens donated from a nationwide sample of parenteral drug abusers during the period 1971-72 had previously been screened [in 1985] for HIV antibodies. Some specimens were considered to be positive to both ELISA and Western blot analysis.
"These findings have been a topic of controversy, since HIV was not thought to have penetrated at-risk populations at such an early date. This study was a follow-up of those [drug addicts] with apparent seropositivity to Western blot analysis.
"Of 10 persons followed, only one death (in 1985) was documented, and postmortem findings were inconsistent with HIV infection... The death occurred in a motor vehicle accident in June 1985, 13 years and 10 months following the [donation of the sample in Lexington in 1972]. The investigation carried out by the local medical examiner's office included a complete postmortem examination.
"The weight of the patient at the time of death (87.7 kilos) was more than 30% higher than his weight at Lexington (67.3 kilos). There was no lymphoreticular changes at autopsy, and a thorough retrospective analysis provided no evidence of either current substance abuse or HIV infection.
"Eight of the remaining [drug addicts] were traced and found to be alive and well in 1989 [some 17 years later]... The 1971-72 serum specimens were not available for retesting.
"[But] the two patients with the strongest 1985 Western blot staining patterns consented to retesting. Fresh specimens were obtained from [them], and were found to be both ELISA and Western blot negative on retesting. Their T-cell parameters were within normal limits...
"Of the seven addicts confirmed as living in 1989, none was reported to be chronically ill. One subject was incarcerated, and his family reported his health to be good."
This "miracle" (since AIDS is said to kill between 0-10 years after infection), led Dr Lange's group to conclude that:
"The earlier Western blot results [in 1985] were most likely false positives and that definitive evidence of HIV infection in the US addict population as early as 1971-72 is still lacking."
They added: "The reasons for false positivity are unclear but cross reactivity with related retroviruses may be one possibility...
"The earlier false positivity could be the consequence of either the state of the serum specimens or the test kit or assay employed. It has been suggested that artifactual findings may occur as a consequence of frequent thawing and refreezing of serum aliquots, and that frequent refreezing might affect the physical properties and serologic characteristics of the serum protein moieties."
So, now, can we take this as proof that freezing samples for a long time renders them unreliable for accurate HIV readings?
The "1959 sample" from Central Africa had been lying in the fridge for 39 long years before the recent declaration that it was the mother of all AIDS. And don't forget that the Lexington samples that fooled the American researchers in 1985 had been frozen for only 13 years (from 1972 to 1985).
Therefore, how reliable is the recent "evidence" blaming the "1959 sample" for starting the AIDS epidemic? If samples frozen for only 13 years give unreliable results, isn't it puzzling that a sample frozen for 39 long years can give accurate readings?
For an informed answer, we must go back to Dr Rosalind Harrison's June 1997 article in New African. These days, she wrote, "even 'normal' science does not function independently of its social, economic and political context.
"The days of the independent scientist conducting experiments in the study at home are long gone, and the political and economic priorities of government and industry now largely determine the allocation of funds.
"And, as scientists bring into their work their own particular cultural baggage, so too the results of their work are expected to conform with the prevailing cultural norms or vested interests.
"From the beginning of the epidemic, the political aspects of AIDS have been exceptionally prominent... Such is the murkiness of AIDS science..."
In short, we can all go to sleep safely in our beds with the knowledge that the February announcement is another "political" evidence being used to blame Africa for the origins of AIDS.
