Treatment of SIV may have caused HIV

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Treatment of SIV may have caused HIV 12 December 2001 LONDON By health-newswire.com reporters Unsterilised needles that were shared among 23 million Africans could have created the deadly AIDS disease, according to a new theory. Photo Matthew Munro - Health Media Ltd An article published in medical journal The Lancet suggests that needles that were used to administer antibiotics on the continent during the 1950s could have caused a relatively benign monkey virus to mutate into AIDS. Worldwide there are currently around 40 million people with HIV, and more than 70 per cent of these sufferers live in sub-Saharan Africa. Scientists have never been able to conclusively demonstrate how the disease emerged, and some have even suggested that it could have originated in US biological weapons experiments. Now a group of US researchers, led by Dr Ernest Drucker of the Montefiore Medical Center, New York, believe they may have found the answer. The team say that the Simian Immunodeficiency Virus (SIV), found in monkeys, could be to blame. The virus has been around for millennia, and African hunters often became infected with it through bites and cuts without developing AIDS. However, during the 1950s there was a large-scale United Nations-sponsored campaign using penicillin to combat diseases such as Yaws, and the scientists speculate that this was when the monkey virus crossed over into humans. Each time a person with SIV was injected with penicillin and the needle was passed on, according to the team, the virus would be transmitted in a slightly mutated form. After a number of mutations it transformed into AIDS. “It would be a cruel irony if the introduction of antibiotics into Africa in the last years of the colonial period should be associated with the origins of the HIV pandemic,” they write. Dr Drucker and his team also suspect that the current spread of HIV and hepatitis C virus is due largely to massive use of unsterilised needles – both for illicit and medical injections. “As recently as 1998, the World Health Organization (WHO) still recommended re-use of syringes up to 200 times in vaccination programmes – relying on sterilisation routines the WHO’s own studies show are usually not followed,” they note. ?Health Media Ltd 2001 http://www.health-news.co.uk