Monkey Virus DNA Found In Rare Human Cancers

摘要

When Keerti Shah walked into the Natcher Auditorium at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) last week, he felt as if he were stepping back in time. The topic-whether a monkey virus called simian virus 40 (SV40) causes cancer in humans-was one he had first addressed more than 30 years earlier. Now, the issue had popped up again. In 1960, researchers discovered that SV40 had inadvertently contaminated some batches of polio vaccine. A year later, it was proven capable of causing Cancer in hamsters, raising alarms that some of the 98 million people in the United States who had been vaccinated during the late 1950s were at risk. Epidemiological and experimental studies done by Shah, a virologist at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in Baltimore, and others at that time apparently laid that worry to rest: There was no evidence of increased cancer risk in people who had received the suspect vaccines.