Polio Vaccine-AIDS Issue "Is Resolved"

A study heaps doubts on the explosive theory that an oral polio vaccine used in Africa 50 years ago was tainted with HIV, scientists reported Monday. The new research in the Proceedings of the May 14th issue of the National Academy of Sciences, like several other studies released last year, demonstrates that the polio vaccine used in the prevention campaign was derived from rhesus macaque monkeys, and not, as some dissenters have suggested, chimpanzees. The distinction is critical because chimpanzees carry simian immunodeficiency virus, which is thought to have leapt from monkeys or chimps into humans, launching the global AIDS virus. Rhesus macaques do not carry the virus. The new study probed short segments of primate DNA in preserved lots of the half-century-old vaccine. It could only have come from macaques, the researchers say.

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