Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2002. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Sunday Times (Johannesburg) - Sunday 01 September 2002
Andre Jurgens
A SOUTH African doctor is planning to illegally capture wild chimpanzees - which are endangered - to use in an HIV vaccine experiment.
And despite stinging criticism from environmentalists, including chimp expert Jane Goodall, Dr Victor Toma is unapologetic. "I am planning to break the law for the good of humanity," he said this week.
Toma placed a newspaper advert, on the eve of the World Summit on Sustainable Development, seeking financial support for an HIV vaccine study on live chimps. He plans to get the six to 11 chimps from the Democratic Republic of Congo.
When contacted by a Sunday Times journalist, posing as a potential investor on Wednesday, Toma admitted that his experiment was "not perfectly legal" .
It could take years to get permission to conduct the experiment in South Africa via a legal process that was "cumbersome and not feasible", he explained.
But the creatures were easy to capture, for a small fee, in or near the DRC. They would be infected with HIV and injected with the vaccine "on a farm in northern Zambia" in a three- month pilot study costing about R100 000, he said.
There was a fortune to be made if the vaccine worked, claimed the 65-year-old doctor who is a consultant specialising in blood diseases at Kimberley Hospital.
He repeated his plan to members of the Jane Goodall Institute, a global environmental group, which made anonymous inquiries about the advertisement. Toma also sent a CV and a detailed analysis of his vaccine to several "investors".
When confronted by this newspaper on Thursday, Toma said: "Chimpanzees are protected on paper. But morally they are not. Thousands are invading farms in the Congo and Zambia. They are a pest."
Asked about their fate, he said: "They will be released in nature or, if infected, I will probably put them down. I have killed thousands of mice, rats and beautiful rabbits.
"How many cows and chickens are killed in London every day?"
HIV-infected blood would be drawn from readily available "patients" in Zambia and small quantities of the vaccine could be made within hours, he claimed.
Five pharmaceutical companies in South Africa have declined to subsidise his research, he said.
Reacting to criticism from environmentalists, Toma said: "I understand the greens. They love nature but they do not have logical thinking. Some 95% of medicines we use today were tested on animals."
But Goodall, in Johannesburg for the World Summit, said scientists were abandoning HIV research on chimps. She said the plan was "totally dishonest".
"Chimpanzees are highly endangered, their numbers are declining. The very idea of experimenting on them illegally would be totally dishonest and against Cites."
The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna is a voluntary global effort to end trade in animals and plants whose survival is threatened. It lists chimps among animals "threatened with extinction".
Chimps injected with HIV do not develop Aids, Goodall said.
Yugoslavian-born Toma became a UN political refugee in 1964 and arrived in Bloemfontein nine years later. He has worked at the University of the Free State and in the former Transkei. He also ran private pathology laboratories in Mafikeng , Lesotho and KwaZulu-Natal, and is an expert in blood transfusions.
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