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Medical fact or fiction?
Three books--two nonfiction and one novel--explore the tricky business of disease prevention. But which of these accounts is to be believed?
By CHARLES GODFREY
Equal aliquots of fact and fiction are being transfused into the body politic these days to control the daily craving for the fix of a medical breakthrough before noon. In spite of a host of reporters, pharmaceutical PR types and an abundance of ink, the consumer is flummoxed by these two f-words: fact and fiction.
Three recently published books that examine the edges between medical fact and fiction are sure to add to the discussion.
In The River, Edward Hooper maintains in a 1,070-page, closely indexed, meticulously footnoted study, that certain batches of CHAT, an experimental polio vacine developed by Dr. Hilary Koprowski in Philadelphia in the 1950s, was prepared in a substrate of chimpanzee kidneys. He further argues a simian immunodeficiency virus, latently present in some of those kidneys, may have infected a proportion of the population of Central Africa between 1957 and 1960.
This, according to the writer, sparked the AIDS pandemic. The book created a storm of controversy. Dr. Koprowski and Dr. Jonas...