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An Unintended Consequence?

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A scientific research team has reached the startling conclusion that the eradication of smallpox may have inadvertently fueled the spread of AIDS. Their explanation: The smallpox vaccine known as vacinnia appears to boost resistance to the HIV virus that causes AIDS, and the shelving of that vaccine as smallpox was stamped out may have kick-started the AIDS epidemic. Looking to the future, their work also suggests that the smallpox vaccine could provide some protection against HIV-AIDS, or slow the progression of the disease.

Consider the course of events. In 1959, a University of Washington medical geneticist named Dr. Arno Motulsky collected the first documented human blood sample containing the HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) during a trip to Africa. The HIV virus is now believed to have emerged in chimpanzees in about 1931, but not to have begun its rapid spread through the human population until the 1950s -- just as global health authorities were scaling back the use of smallpox vaccine as that disease was eradicated. HIV-AIDS subsequently became a global pandemic that to date has killed perhaps 25 million people worldwide, including at least 5,400 in Washington state.

Scientists have long struggled to understand the unusually rapid spread of AIDS, but have never found the usual explanations (endemic warfare, use of unsterilized needles and medical equipment, unprotected sex) completely satisfactory.

Now, a new study headed by Dr. Raymond S. Weinstein of George Mason University (Weinstein is a 1980 graduate of the UW Medical School) has concluded, based on its initial research, that the smallpox vaccine conferred to those treated with it some resistance to HIV. The Weinstein study report says its findings, and those of a subsequent inquiry, "suggest that prior immunization with vaccinia virus might play a role in providing an individual with some degree of protection to subsequent HIV infection and/or disease progression. These results also provide some support to the hypothesis of a possible relationship between smallpox eradication and the still unexplained, sudden emergence of HIV-1. Further studies along these lines, involving larger groups of subjects are needed to substantiate our results and to fully elucidate the mechanism at work."

The study was published online by BMC Immunology.

By Tom Brown, June 18, 2010

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