The River: A Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS
Now in paperback: the news-making medical detective story. Hailed both for its revelations and its intense readability, this extraordinary work of investigative reporting examines the myriad theories about the origin of AIDSand offers compelling evidence that an experimental polio vaccine administered in Africa in the 1950s led to one of the most devastating infectious diseases in human history.Amazon.com Review
For all the devastation and suffering AIDS h… More >>
The River: A Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS
Topic: aids, amazon, experimental polio vaccine, hiv, hiv and aids, infectious diseases, investigative reporting, medical detective story, The River
Perhaps it is because I am a physician with a background in public health who also had polio as a child that I am so captivated by the narrative that Mr.Hooper tells. In spite of its length (and weight) I could not put the book down till I finished it. Mr. Hooper is an extraordinary persistant journalist and detective as well as raconteur, ferreting out details of process, politics, culture, and personality to weave an extraordinary story about the possible origins of the AIDS epidemic. In spite of the fact that he is the ardent advocate of a horrific iconoclastic hypothesis he tells the story of his searches in a most honest andeven handed way. His laying out in fine detail the history of the development of the polio vaccine, of medical research in tropical Africa, Europe and the United States both in technical terms and in the personalities involved, and the investigation of the earliest AIDS cases is a tour de force. All this in a first person narrative that reads like a detective story. As a reader I felt introduced on intimate level to the many people and locales on three continents where these events unfold. This book teaches us to admire the verve, creativity, and daring of medical innovators as well as their arrogance, while at the same time, whatever actually happended, the events in retrospect constitute a spiritual lesson in humility.
Rating: 5 / 5
The title of this book refers to the Congo River of Africa. This great river became famous in Western minds in the 1800s with the journeys of Dr. Livingstone. Later, it would be the setting of The Heart of Darkness. Doctors and scientists in the heart of darkness indeed as The River explains in its long, well-documented, exhaustive tale of secretive, unregulated medical research. This book’s author interviews hundreds of individuals involved in this process, goes over countless documents, and from it, pieces together the following story.
After WWII there was a race to find a vaccine for polio that could be administered orally. Numerous groups of scientists from around the world took part in this race; the prize being fame, fortune, and patents galore. In public, these teams agreed to perform all their research in Western countries, document everything, and only conduct tests on adults who had signed written consent forms. In reality, many of these teams flocked to the Africa Congo to perform large-scale tests on unwitting and unknowing human populations, often without oversight by the press or medical institutions. These groups would inject various African primates with polio, extract serum from the infected primates, and using this serum to make experimental vaccines which would then be given to the local human populations.
This book contends that by this process, HIV was accidentally transmitted from certain monkeys into humans. The author provides numerous pieces of evidence in proof of this theory. First, the very same villages in the Congo where HIV was first discovered also happened to be the very same villages in which the polio tests were performed. Second, HIV was diagnosed in these villages 10 – 20 years after the polio tests were performed. Third, none of the other currently existing theories can explain how a primate virus passed into the human population, and spread so quickly, over a period of 4 decades, given that the two populations of monkeys and humans had coexisted in the same habitat since the dawn of man without any such transmission. Fourth, during public hearings in the 1950s, the various teams presented their oral vaccines to the world scientific community. One team found an unknown immunodeficiency virus in one of the samples provided by another team. Hmmm, an unknown immunodeficiency virus… sounds like HIV to me… Fifth, the scientists that conducted these trials in the Congo are unwilling to release their samples and scientific data for public scrutiny, even though all the patents and honors have already been distributed…
Overall, this is a very good book. Even if you do not believe the author’s theory, I still highly recommend it for the author covers a lot of aspects of the medical field that one might not necessarily learn in school or in the newspapers. These include making and testing vaccines, animal testing, human testing, obtaining funding for medical research, scientific protocol, relationships between the medical community and governments, medical reporting, competition in the medical community, statistical sampling, and epidimiology.
Rating: 4 / 5
If there was a Nobel Prize for Journalism, Hooper should get it. Step by step he takes you through his investigations and interviews, seeking to prove the link between the sudden appearance of HIV-1 and some shabbily-constructed mass trials of a polio vaccine in the 1950s. In a vanity contest with Sabin and Salk, the lesser-known Koprowski took various experimental shortcuts that seem reckless in hindsight. It’s amazing to see the way Hooper cuts through the obfuscations and obstructions of the science establishment, and sifts facts from the few living people associated with the trials. With the casual racism of the day, these were mostly conducted in the Congo, or on handicapped children or newborns at prisons and hospitals in the US. A sneaking suspicion that ‘Hooper may be right’ builds into almost total conviction that this theory bears intensive investigation by the time you reach the halfway mark. Almost incredibly, the records of these ‘trials’ — I put them in quote marks because they were not properly conducted, by any scientific standards of today, or of the time — are either incomplete, or ‘missing.’ The book reflects no credit on the drug industry, doctors’ codes of secrecy, or medical ethics. Quite probably, if Hopper has it right — and it seems he does — some of the living players ought to be facing a grand jury investigation, in view of the millions who have suffered in the resulting plague of AIDS. It’s the science book of the year, unparalleled since Rhodes’ “Making Of The Atomic Bomb.”
Rating: 5 / 5
A wonderful book which clearly explains some intriguing, if unproven, theories. As much a cautionary tale as a scientific work.
In reference to the Clinical Infectious Diseases article (2001;32:1068-1084), it should be noted that the author of this article was one of the scientists possibly implicated by this book.
Hooper experienced many roadblocks during his research for the book and many of them were placed before him by eminent scientists who preferred not to get involved in a book which might harm the reputation of their profession by suggesting that it may have been responsible (accidentally or otherwise) for disastrous wrongdoing during the development of the OPV.
In the article, the author acknowledges the assistance and input from many of his colleagues in the scientific profession. Personally, I believe this is further proof that the medical/scientific community are more than happy to work together to protect the reputation of their profession but are less inclined to involve themselves in a project aiming to reveal the truth, no matter how horrifying and sinister that truth may turn out to be.
Rating: 5 / 5
When I read a book that tells me new and important things about the world that I have been living in, i note the pages with important info with paperclips. This book is easily a 100-200 paperclip book.
Only other books that compare to this in my large library, devoted to the history of the USA since 1933, are THE MAKING OF THE ATOMIC BOMB by Richard Rhodes and THE ORIGINS OF THE KOREAN WAR by Bruce Cumings.
I have yet to finish the book, I am only finished with chapter 39[out of 58], but these 535 pages were consumed in two evenings, late.
The fascination for me was learning about a set of medical research activities of which I was unaware. From my high school biology I had learned that vaccines were cultured in eggs. What a shock to learn that live polio vaccines were cultured from the cuisinarted kidneys of wild primates.
As of page 535, my only complaint is that I would have liked Hooper to have spent a chapter, with photos, illustrating the mechanism[s] of vaccine production.
As Hooper has developed the recounting of his odyssey, so far, it seems to me clear that there have been a number of knowledgeable medicos who looked the other way when confronted with the Koprowski procedures, a number of medicos who buttoned their lips after the loose scientific procedures went astray.
In closing, I want to add that I passed this book by for weeks because I felt that there was nothing new that I could learn about viral diseases[HIV, AIDs]. And then I read a squib in a newspaper recently where the CDC was recommending that live[oral] polio vaccinations be discontinued as the entire method of polio vaccination. When I read that, I immediately ordered this book.
Vaccines as a business. As a claim to gold and glory.
A perfect sidelight history on the postWW2 era.
Indispensable for understanding the investigative process as it pertains to causation.
The best investigative book of the decade.
Rating: 5 / 5