Update Information of Rolling Stone Article "Origin of AIDS."


In the Rolling Stone article "Origin of AIDS" Tom Curtis wrote "The FDA
has agreed to supply seed stocks [polio vaccine] dating from 1976 on.
But Bohannon won't be getting any earlier samples -- there isn't enough
of this material left.  Dr. Gerald Quninnan, acting director of the
agency's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, tells me that
Sabin's original seed stocks from the early Sixties were not tested even
by the World Health Organization in the middle Eighties when concern
about simian AIDS was high.  That was because there are "only a small
number of vials" of the preparation, Quinnan says, and tests 'might use
it all up.'"


It now appears that the FDA will no longer agree to provide seed stocks
of vaccines subsequent to 1976 until they check with their attorneys.


Brad Stone, spokesperson for the FDA, stated on 3/4/92, to a Houston
medical reporter, that *all* seed stocks prior to 1976 no longer exist.


In a related development on 3/4/92 a former NIH scientist, Dr. Cecil H.
Fox, Department of Neuropathology, Yale University Medical School,
suggested [in a landline conversation] that there had been an "accident"
at the FDA in which the plug was pulled on the freezer containing stored
polio vaccine seed stocks, resulting in a total loss of all stocks
stored for the years preceding 1976. Oops!  This is known in scientific
terms as a "freezer melt-down."


Tonight (3/4/92 9pm PST) CNN picked up on the Rolling Stone article
and featured an interview with Dr. Robert Bohannon, the Baylor College/
Texas AIDS researcher who found SIV (Simian Immunodeficiency Virus)
in an AIDS patient last fall. Bohannon has now run PCR tests on one
batch of polio vaccine stock from 1955, and has found indications of
"Type D" retrovirus, which he says "causes about 99% of Simian AIDS".

Bohannon also commented that further research is needed to help explain
"why we're getting so many sero-positive antibody results to this Simian
AIDS or Type D virus".

Simian Type D virus is extremely immunosuppressive.