Almost 50 years ago an experimental polio vaccine manufactured using chimpanzee kidneys was administered to more a million people in Central Africa. Could this have been the origin of AIDS?

This is one possibility explored in The River – An Inquiry into the Origin of AIDS, a documentary from Montreal’s Galafilm Productions being pitched at the Banff Documart.

The River, offered as both a 90-minute film and as two one-hours, is based on the work of British investigative journalist Edward Hooper, who spent a decade trying to track down the origins of AIDS for his book The River: A Journey Back to the Source of HIV and AIDS.

Galafilm president Arnie Gelbart says The River has been in development for a year and a half since ‘we found the book and went to [the author].’ The film, budgeted at $1.2 million, will be coproduced with France’s Pathe TV.

‘There’s no record of AIDS before 1959,’ says Gelbart. ‘It was found in Kinshasa in the Congo in 1959. The medical mystery is where were the first cases and how did the whole thing explode in that way? One of the theories is that the disease was inadvertently and accidentally the result of an adult polio vaccine given to about a million people in central Africa in 1954.’

At the heart of investigations into the origins of AIDS and HIV is the question of how SIV, simian immune virus, a similar disease that exists in primates and is generally acknowledged as a precursor of the human strain, made the leap from one species to another.

‘There is a relationship between HIV and SIV and it’s believed by some very reputable people that [the polio vaccine] would have been what allowed SIV to jump into the human chain. It’s a very controversial idea,’ says Gelbart.

The adult polio vaccine is only one idea to be posited by the film. ‘That’s one of the theses – the film’s got a number of factors to it. It examines that possibility; it also examines other issues like the testing of medication on Third World populations who don’t understand what the consequences might be.’

Other possible means of transmission of the AIDS virus to be explored in the film include the sloppy butchering of chimps. ‘But they’ve been butchering chimps for thousands of years, so why hadn’t it happened earlier?’ asks Gelbart.

‘It’s important to know what the origin of AIDS is because it helps in the search for a vaccine,’ he says.

Then there are the political ramifications. ‘There are a lot of people in the scientific world who don’t want this talked about or even examined. They think it will discourage people from being vaccinated, and anything that discourages vaccination is a bad thing because vaccination helps people,’ says Gelbart.

‘There’s a huge amount of money spent on AIDS; scientific competition is not a pretty game.’ *