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Further evidence against polio vaccine origin of AIDS
 
 
  NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - New research in the April 22nd issue of Nature provides further evidence that HIV did not originate from an oral polio vaccine developed in the 1950s.
 
The so-called "oral polio vaccine/AIDS theory" asserts that HIV came from Congo chimpanzee tissues that were allegedly used in creating the vaccine. The contention was that these tissues were infected with simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) that became HIV in the cross over to humans.
 
Numerous reports have refuted the oral polio vaccine/AIDS theory on various grounds. Recently, French researchers used mitochondrial DNA analysis to show that the vaccine was prepared with macaque tissues, not with chimpanzee tissues that might be harboring the origin virus (see Reuters Health report May 13, 2002).
 
In the latest argument against the theory, Dr. Michael Worobey, from the University of Arizona in Tucson, and colleagues show that although SIV is common among chimpanzees in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the circulating virus is phylogenetically different from all strains of HIV-1.
 
"The molecular epidemiological data presented here, together with data suggesting that HIV-1 group M originated 30 years before oral polio vaccine trials were conducted and the absence of detectable SIV or chimpanzee DNA in archival stocks of oral polio vaccine, should finally lay the oral polio vaccine/AIDS theory to rest," the authors note.
 
Nature 2004;428:820.
 

 
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