Polio Vaccine for AIDS Treatment?
Twelve persons with ARC and one with AIDS have been treated by repeated injections of killed-virus polio vaccine three to seven times per week. All have show major improvement or complete remission of symptoms, usually within two months, and T-cell counts have also improved. Results of one case have been published. A report on the next four cases is in press, and a complete report will be published later.
The physicians tried polio vaccine because they had already had good results with one case of acute lymphocytic leukemia, believed to be caused by a retrovirus related to HIV. In this case, a child who was not expected to live was given the vaccine for several years, and tested for eight years to confirm the remission of the leukemia. He has now been healthy for 20 years after the treatment began.
That child's physician had tried the vaccine in desperation, after learning that new leukemia cases decreased in areas which had a polio outbreak. This decrease suggested that there might be a cross immunity between polio and the retrovirus--perhaps because mammals had evolved an ability to produce antibodies to a certain groups of disease-causing organisms when exposed to only one of them.
The first HIV patient was a physician with KS, thrush, fatigue, weight loss of 60 pounds, and a T-4 count of 40.
Improvements started within six weeks; by ten weeks the KS, thrush, and most of the other symptoms had disappeared. He still had severe mental depression, however, and stopped the treatment in favor of another experimental therapy, and was lost to follow-up.
The next four patients treated were gay men with ARC; an article on this phase of the study will appear in Clinical Immunology and Immunopathology. Three of these patients started with relatively high T-cell counts averaging over 400; their symptoms resolved completely within two to seven months. The fourth did not have an initial T-cell count available; his lymphadenopathy resolved completely, but some fatigue remained after 11 months of treatment.
The killed-virus (Salk) polio vaccine used is believed to be entirely safe, and is commonly used for persons with immune deficiencies who cannot use the Sabin live-virus vaccine. However, there has been some controversy about whether persons with AIDS or ARC should receive any immunization, because of fear that increasing activation of the immune system could stimulate the growth of HIV. Last week we spoke with Dr. Pitts, one of the authors of the paper cited above; he is convinced that the benefits far outweigh any risk.
He has now treated 12 persons with ARC, and every one treated long enough to evaluate has shown resolution of symptoms. They are able to work and entirely healthy. T-cells have increased by at least 67 percent, and sometimes much more.
The polio vaccine trial has met skepticism from some immunologists, who say that polio immunization would not work
for AIDS because it is a different virus. Immunologists are currently emphasizing the specificity of the immune response.
Dr. Pitts points out that although the polio virus and HIV are in different families and reproduce differently, they are similar in structure in some ways. And there are many examples of common antibodies among different viruses, going all the way back to the first vaccination, which used cowpox virus to prevent smallpox.
Dr. Pitts is board certified in both psychiatry and pediatrics. He has studied the effects of viruses in the brain's limbic system (which controls mood)--including possible viral causes of depression. He became interested in retroviral diseases because the child whose case is described above is his son.
The polio vaccine trial has IRB (institutional review board) approval to enroll 100 patients; since only 12 are enrolled so far, places are open for others. Dr. Pitts will consider persons with AIDS as well as ARC for the study. Only one person with AIDS has been treated so far, however, and it is not known whether the vaccine will be effective if the illness is very far advanced.
Dr. Pitts is also recruiting physicians to work with him in testing this treatment. Physicians could of course use the treatment anywhere.