Science

The smuggled pair of Papua New Guinean human viruses, the Kuru and Hagahai, have found their places among the United States Military's cold war biological and chemical arsenal at Fort Detriek P4 Laboratory (a former United States Army Biological and Chemical Weapons laboratory where some killer viruses are kept, ready for export.

The viruses played a major role in shifting the frontiers of global scientific knowledge, particularly their respective role in raising new understanding on the pathogenic behaviours of slow latent viruses for both human and animals.

A senior Papua New Guinea Foreign Affairs official and former journalist, Dominic Sengi, revealed this to scholars and students in a seminar organised by the Melanesian and Pacific Studies (MAPS) Center at the University of Papua New Guinea recently.

Sengi who has been single-handedly fighting agencies of the United States Government for Papua New Guinea to have patent rights over the two human viruses said that it is a long drawn battle. He urged local scientists and government agencies to join him in the fight to have ownership of these two notable viruses.

Sengi said in his paper titled "Papua New Guinea's Viral Agents in America" that he believes the departure of these viruses from Papua New Guinea shores in the 1970s and 1980s was due to negligence by the Papua New Guinea Secret Service and the National Health Department at that time.

They had no idea of the flight of the viruses to some highly specialised experimental laboratories in the United States, which produced biological and chemical weapons. The Papua New Guinea Medical Research Institute (MRI) also failed to provide strategic and economic intelligence to the government on the movement of these viruses.

The viruses were derived from two stone-age communities of Papua New Guinea‹kuru from the Fore people of Goroka, in the Eastern Highlands province, in the 1950s and hagahai from the Hagahais, a primitive society of the Western Schraeder Mountains of the Madang province in 1984/85. They were the world's last stone-age tribes to be discovered practising their own rituals, cultures and beliefs when modern science confronted them. Thus they did not have a clue about the language of science and the importance of the Binatang (virus causing organisms) that American scientists were interested in.

The kuru endemic was scientifically proven to be a retro-virus by virologist, Carlton Gajdusek. It is an infectious disease that could lie dormant in its victims for several years but can fatally ravage its host over time. It was discovered that the victims were unable to stand and usually died within a year after first showing symptoms.

Further tests at the United States National Institute of Health's National Institute of Neurological Disease and Blindness (NINDS) revealed that this virus was transmissible and can jump species barrier.

Almost 27 years after the first virus left its evolutional habitat, a similar feat took place again in Papua New Guinea. In 1984/85, the same lot of American virus hunters whisked out by helicopter a sample of the scientifically valuable blood drawn from a healthy unsuspecting Papua New Guinea male in Hagahai.

At this time the Hagahais were still a stone-age society in that they were homogenous, self-evolving people enjoying the use of their near stone-age environment.

In a United States laboratory, after tissue culture, a cell line was developed from this Hagahai blood, and an application was lodged to the United States Patent and Trademark Office for patent right. Sengi said it is still not clear if the patent right was abandoned after pressure from a Canadian non-government organisation, Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI). It may remain active in cell cultures in laboratories in the United States.

The Hagahai virus discovered in 1984/85 by Robert Gallo, Michael Alpers and others including medical anthropologist, Carol Jenkins who was attached to MRI, was identified by science as another retro-virus very similar to HIV. The agent causing AIDS is called Human T-lymphadenopathy virus type III (HTLV-III) while the Hagahai is HTLV-I (PNG-I). It is known that HTLV-I behaves in the same way as HTLV-III. Both viruses are said to infect the same cells of the immune system.

While HTLV-III (or HIV) kills the white blood cells and destroys the immune system, HTLV-I infects and transforms these cells into cancer cells. This causes cancer of the white blood cells (Adult T-cell leukemia), which causes problems in the central nervous system of an infected person. This means there is a relationship between AIDS and the Hagahai retro-virus. Both have common characteristics in that they stay embedded in their host and kill them over time.

Sengi's research paper pursues the trail of the viruses movement from Papua New Guinea and the kind of treatment at different times at the hands of various scientists in the United States.

He said kuru was earlier identified as a lenti-virus (a slow killing human virus of the central nervous system) but has since been classified by science as a prion, a sub-virus of a lenti-virus. This is yet to be confirmed.

He continues his fight without the backing of agencies of the Papua New Guinea government.

"It's highly unlikely that officers of the government have the slightest idea of what the issue is all about because it's more scientific and complex. Something beyond their comprehension," he suggested.

His struggles are based on the fact that while it will take many more years for primitive societies like PNG to graduate to modern levels of understanding of science, there should be an avenue for cohesiveness, open enquiry, and sharing of scientific knowledge for the common good of mankind. Failing this would result in inequality and misunderstanding‹a recipe for uneven advancement and development.

He said the question of proprietorship given that the DNA information from the Hagahai male and the fact that he is not an American citizen is a puzzle.

The communities were both primitive and cannibalistic and western scientists took them for granted. State of primitiveness demands a much greater degree of respect and honour from scientifically advanced countries.

He told the seminar that Papua New Guinea and the Pacific should be more vigilant and must not take scientists' words for granted as they come to do research on our shores.

He congratulated the government for making a start to establish a body to oversee Intellectual Property Rights.

He also expressed concern that while it has been proven that these viruses are transferrable between animal species (including humans), medical researchers in Papua New Guinea have not yet isolated the origin or source of the first HIV/AIDS victim, a housewife, from the Central province in 1989.