Monkey Virus 

Monkey Virus

Jay Ingram has a piece in the Toronto Star (not on line) dealing with speculation that AIDS crossed into the human population in Africa by way of polio vaccine, which was produced using monkey tissue. Simian Immuno-deficiency Virus (SIV) may have been present. This speculation got into the news again because Kenyan ecologist Wangari Maathai was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and she has suggested that the launch of human AIDS in Africa might have been somehow deliberate.

As far as it goes, this seems to be nothing more than nutbar speculation--although according to Ingram, it does help to reveal that very little is known about how AIDS began.

There is still a bigger story, however, which Ingram doesn't mention. There is increasing evidence that a monkey virus (Simian Virus 40 or SV 40) included in "early" polio vaccine--in the 50s--has contributed to many types of cancer.

One remarkable example is mesothelioma--a cancer which was extremely rare until the 50s, and has shown something of an outbreak since then. It is generally associated with exposure to asbestos--although 20% of cases show no exposure to asbestos.

Then in August, Carbone and several colleagues published a major study providing a "mechanistic" explanation of how SV40 contributes to the uncontrolled growth of mesothelial cells. The key, they found, was the large number of "tumor suppressor" proteins found in the mesothelial cells that makes them unusually susceptible to SV40.

In most human cells, they said, the virus reproduces itself and kills the infected cell in the process. But in mesothelial cells, SV40 is especially attracted to the "tumor suppressor" proteins and binds to them, knocking them out of action. The virus then lives on in the cell.

The result, they said, is a rate of malignant cell transformation in tissue cultures 1,000 times higher than has ever been observed.

In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Carbone further explained that asbestos fibers appear to act as a co- carcinogen in mesothelioma by somehow suppressing the immune system's response, which is designed to kill the infected cells.