Monkey AIDS? Below is the letter I sent to the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle regarding the monkey-AIDS vaccine that made headlines around the world. I doubt it will get published, but I've been surprised in the past. -- David Rasnick
Oct. 21, 2000
Finally, a weapon to fight the raging monkey AIDS epidemic: "In Study, Vaccine Protects Monkeys Infected With AIDS-Like Virus." I'm sure the monkeys around the world are celebrating the good news. Since humans are the only animals that naturally get Aids when infected with an immunodeficiency virus, Dr. Norman Letvin's team at Harvard had to create one that would make laboratory animals sick. They infected the monkeys with SHIV, a blended virus that produces an especially quick and deadly Aids-like illness in monkeys. The monkeys who did not receive the vaccine against the created virus all became sick and half died within 140 days. This is a startling admission: scientists can engineer an AIDS virus that is specific for monkeys. If that is true, then scientists, in principle, could engineer an AIDS virus for cows, dogs-and why not people? The ability to engineer an AIDS virus is exactly what some have claimed. There are those who say that the CIA and similar humanitarian organizations engineered HIV as a means to remove undesirables. My response to such claims is that if the CIA did indeed create HIV, we taxpayers didn't get our money's worth. HIV is a dud-completely harmless. So harmless, in fact, that I have offered on several occasions in South Africa to be treated with it on national television if some AZT-prescribing doctor will at the same time start a life-time course of the anti-HIV drugs, which I know will lead to AIDS diseases and death. I am certain that it is not possible to engineer an AIDS virus for any living creature. There simply is no such thing-nor even the possibility of such a thing-as an AIDS virus. So I'm definitely not implying that an AIDS virus can be created. However, Dr. Letvin is opening Pandora's box by claiming that his team has engineered an AIDS virus to order for monkeys. Not to worry, though. The giveaway that they have not really engineered a monkey AIDS virus but simply another typical pathogenic virus is that their virus is "especially quick and deadly." The infected monkeys became sick and half died within 0.39 years (140 days). Such a quick response to infection is typical of real pathogenic, infectious agents. However, we are told that HIV causes death in humans on average 10 years (3600 days) after being infected, and then only after becoming immune to it, i.e. after having developed antibodies to HIV. Just as with humans, the monkey deaths are called AIDS deaths only because they were infected with Simian-HIV, which in Letvin's mind must cause monkey AIDS. I fully accept that Letvin and his colleagues have engineered a pathogenic virus. I would not volunteer to be treated with Letvin's virus because it behaves like a real virus in that it causes disease and death in monkeys-and perhaps people-in short order. Conversely, HIV has never been shown to be pathogenic under any circumstance.
David Rasnick, PhD  TORONTO
tel/fax:(416) 406-HEAL
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