NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #16/NN_1992_16.iso/spool/sci/med/aids/1551

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Subject: Houston Post Article 7/25/92
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The following information has been summarized and excerpted from the
Saturday, July 25, 1992, edition of The Houston Post with the permission
of the author, Tom Curtis.

This article is not copyrighted.

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NEW EVIDENCE OF AIDS-MONKEY LINK

In the first reported evidence suggesting that people can catch a
relative of the AIDS virus that kills some species of monkeys, two
laboratory workers have tested positive for simian immunodeficiency
virus (SIV).

The new came in a memorandum from the director of the National
Institutes of Health.  A copy of the memo was obtained this week by The
Houston Post.

Two scientists said the report added fuel to the circumstantial case
that AIDS may have resulted from a polio vaccine inadvertently
contaminated with viruses from monkey kidney cultures.

The federal government is launching two major studies aimed at finding
out how widespread SIV may be among scientists and technicians who work
with monkeys or monkey blood products infected with the virus, according
to the memo from NIH director Dr. Bernadine Healy.  The memo was quietly
faxed this week from NIH headquarters in Bethesda, Md., to directors of
the nation's seven regional primate centers.

The second study, now being implemented, "will provide voluntary testing
for workers at risk for exposure to SIV," Healy wrote.  "I encourage you
to participate...if you are at potential risk for exposure to SIV."

Healy was out of her office Friday and will be unavailable for comment
for the new week, her secretary said.  Most well-known AIDS and SIV
researchers inside and outside the federal government were attending the
international AIDS conference in Amsterdam this week and could not be
reached for comment.

"The bottom line is that these viruses do cross the species barrier, if
this is really a persistent infection," said Dr. William Morton, deputy
director of the Regional Primate Research Center at the University of
Washington in Seattle.  Like other scientists interviewed Friday, Morton
noted that SIV is extremely close in genetic structure to HIV-2, a form
of the human immunodeficiency virus said to cause human AIDS in Western
Africa.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration last April instructed the nation's
blood centers to test blood starting June 1 for HIV-2 as well as for
HIV-1.  It wasn't immediately clear whether new tests that pick up both
HIV-1 and HIV-2 would likewise identify SIV-tainted blood, but a
knowledgeable scientists said that they probably would do so.

Several scientists said the report about two people testing positive for
SIV adds credence to the theory that AIDS may have entered the human
population as an accidental results of a live oral polio vaccine made
using the kidneys of a monkey that carried SIV or HIV.

"Any report that people can be infected by SIV tends to support the
theory," said Dr. Gerasmos Lecatsas, chair of the department of virology
at the Medical University of Southern Africa in Pretoria, South Africa.
"It's added circumstantial evidence."

Dr. Cecil Fox, a longtime AIDS researcher, said from his office in
suburban Washington, D.C., that the NIH memo "just confirms the
likelihood that HIV had a simian (monkey) origin and, second, that the
transmission to humans could have occurred from hunters (who cut
themselves while skinning monkeys), lab workers, or SIV contamination of
polio vaccines."

Gerald Meyers of Los Alamos National Laboratory, the federal
government's chief expert in the science of tracing the evolution of
HIV, and several colleagues have written in an AIDS research journal
that it is possible "human immunodeficiency virus (HIVs) may simply be
simian immunodeficiency viruses (SIVs) residing in and adapting to a
human host."

They added: "There is no clear answer to this question at this time;
however, the notion if less far-fetched in 1992 than it was merely a few
years ago..."

The NIH memo said that one of the lab workers who tested positive for
the monkey virus did so "as the result of a needle stick" and the other
was exposed to specimens from a macaque infected with SIV.  Neither
person was identified and it was not said whether they worked for the
federal government, primate centers, or private employers like drug
companies.

According to the memo, the second person who tested positive for SIV was
not wearing gloves when ho or she came into contact with the virus.  The
worker also was experiencing "active dermatitis," a skin disease.

In the first person to test positive, the level of antibodies to SIV has
declined "over a two year period," the memo said.  That appears to
suggest an absence or reduction in infection, according to a source at
the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta who declined to be
quoted by name.

Similarly, Dr. James L. Blanchard, who heads the department of
veterinary sciences at Tulane Regional Primate Center in Covington, La.,
says that six months ago the CDC discussed the first case.  At that
time, it said there was no evidence the virus was reproducing itself and
that there was "no indication of infection."

But the second individual continues to test positive with increasing
antibody levels, "suggesting persistent infection," Healy wrote.  She
said the first, more reassuring case, has been reported to the British
medical journal Lancet by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).  That
account "will be published in the next few weeks."  However, there was
no indication that the more disturbing case has been reported to any
medical journal.

The CDC, which first made NIH aware of the two cases, did not respond to
telephone inquiries made to its press office Friday.  Likewise, NIH did
not respond to requests for interviews with its administrators.

"We have the matter under consideration and wore working with experts to
consider appropriate steps," NIH spokesman Dan Ralbovsky said, reading a
prepared statement in its entirety.  "No one is ill," the statement
concluded.

"All we have to do is wait another five or 10 years to find out if
people who test positive for the virus actually get sick," said an NIH
researcher who works with monkey blood.

The Healy memo says the government suspects that infection with SIV,
which is a member of the same lentivirus subfamily of retroviruses as
the human immunodeficiency virus linked to AIDS, is "an uncommon even in
humans."

Previously some scientists have suggested that infection of people with
SIV was all but impossible.  "The conventional wisdom is it's not
supposed to happen," noted Stacy Maloney, spokesman for the Southwestern
Foundation for Biomedical Research in San Antonio.

Despite the previous medical dogma that SIV could not infect human
beings, officials at several primate centers said Friday that they were
not surprised by the news.

Blanchard of the Tulane center, for instance, said "there's always been
that possibility."  He noted that scientists earlier had shown that SIV
could be grown in human cells in the laboratory.

"It's always been a subject of concern," said Dr. Douglas M. Bowden,
director of the Regional Primate Center at the University of Washington
in Seattle, who estimated that out of about 4,000 monkeys at the center
300 to 350 are infected with SIV.

He said his primate center has always taken precautions "as if SIV was a
pathogen (cause of disease) for humans."  The two people who tested
positive for SIV, he said, "obviously weren't following procedures" that
call for wearing gloves and other protective clothing when handling SIV-
infected monkeys and monkey blood products.

SIV was first discovered in the 1980s and was found to be carried
silently by African green monkeys, the natural hosts, which do not get
sick from the virus.  However, when other monkey species, such as rhesus
macaques, are exposed to SIV, some become ill with an AIDS-like disease
and die.

Some researchers studying SIV have found that when the virus was passed
from one susceptible monkey to the next, it became more virulent.
Finally, after many such passages from monkey to monkey, the virus was
re-introduced to the original host--the one that at first showed no
symptoms--with lethal effect.

Beginning in the early 1960s, African green monkeys became the preferred
species whose kidneys were harvested to make primary monkey kidney
culture to grow live oral polio vaccine.  They remain so today in the
United States.

The sole make of live oral polio vaccines in the United States, Lederle
Laboratories, a subsidiary of American Cyanamid, has told The Post it
currently tests for SIV and discards any pre-vaccine material tainted
with SIV.

But critics including lawyer Walter Kyle have questioned whether SIV was
present in polio vaccines prior to the 1980s, when no test existed to
identify  and eliminate it.  Last March Kyle wrote an article in the
Lancet suggesting that a novel treatment for herpes--double doses twice
as often as indicated for polio immunization--might have spawned AIDS
among homosexuals who received the herpes treatment in New York and
California.  The unorthodox treatment was introduced in the mid-1970s
and is now discouraged as ineffective.
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