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The long-held belief that the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) began in Africa has been challenged by a British writer, sparking off a fresh debate on the origins of the disease.

In his recent book, 'The river: A journey back to the source of HIV and AIDS,' Edward Hooper put forward the provocative theory that AIDS actually was introduced to the African continent by western medicine.

According to Hooper, this happened during the tests for a Polio vaccine, conducted in the 1950s and 1960s in certain parts of east and central Africa by western medical researchers.

Hooper suspects that the vaccine used in the experimental programme accidentally had been contaminated by a monkey virus that had traces of the Simian Immuno Deficiency Virus.

This is not the first time that such a theory has been propounded, an article in the US-based magazine 'Rolling Stone' made the same charge in 1992 and Hooper's critics have turned to the research that followed that article to dismiss his conclusions.

At that time, says Lisa Jacobs of the UN's joint programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), the scientific community was intrigued by the 'incredible hypothesis,' and the validity of the theory was put to test. 'the result was that there were too many holes to make it a useful theory,' she adds.

The same was true of Hooper's book, Jacobs says. 'most experts, who base their opinions on scientific grounds, believe Hooper's theory to be highly unlikely.'

A British newspaper published a report containing similar sentiments - that Hooper's argument has been rejected by 'most of the scientific community.'

The author has his defenders, however, who argue that the studies carried out after the 'Rolling Stone' article appeared were partly based on a published finding that later 'was shown to be in error.' and just last week, an article in a US newspaper had this to say: 'experts writing in journals have praised Hooper's diligence and scholarship, and the plausibility of the thesis.'

  Since it was detected by doctors in 1981, the origins of HIV/AIDS have been a mystery, and the desperate search for answers to its genesis has spawned myths and a variety of theories.

Among the more bizarre explanations was that HIV was an alien from outer space or that it was an agent of biological warfare.

Virologists, on the other hand, have settled for more plausible reasons like the one that says 'a forerunner of HIV could have 'jumped' species from monkeys to humans if blood from a monkey was splashed into a cut or a mucous membrane, such as the eye.' nevertheless, states a UNAIDS release, a convincing answer has remained elusive.

The medical community does believe that HIV may have entered the human population sometime in the 1970s and that its explosive spread during the years that followed was the result of 'urbanisation, cheap travel and major international conflicts increasing the potential for people from different communities to have sex with each other.'

Today, the worst hit region in the world is Sub-Saharan Africa, where close to 3,800 HIV/AIDS victims are detected every day, with almost 90 percent of them having indulged in heterosexual sex.