Posted on 01/17/2002 12:38:00 PM PST by Outraged At FLA
Here is some of what is posted on the page:
Jan. 17 — The chimpanzee version of the AIDS virus appears to be extremely rare in wild chimps, which suggests the apes evolved a way to deal with the killer virus generations ago, researchers said on Thursday. The study also confirmed earlier theories that AIDS passed to humans from chimps in Central Africa, they said
SCIENTISTS HAVE long known nonhuman primates carry their own version of the AIDS virus. But so far, it has been found only in captive chimpanzees. No one knows how prevalent or geographically or genetically diverse the virus is in chimps in the wild.
The new study is the first to find an HIV-like virus in a wild chimp. And the chimp was found in a different part of Africa than they researchers had suspected.
This particular type of chimp in Tanzania could not be the source for human AIDS, because the viral strain the researchers found is too genetically different.
But now that they’ve proved virus testing can be successful in the jungle without disturbing the endangered species, the scientists are beginning the next key step: tracking different chimps in an even more remote part of Africa, where the virus is thought to have jumped from animals to man.
The research, published in Friday’s issue of the journal Science, involved chimp experts including Jane Goodall, who has studied the animals for 40 years, and groups working in Central and West Africa.
THE ORIGINS OF AIDS
“It obviously confirms and extends the theory on the origin of AIDS,” said Beatrice Hahn of the University of Alabama, who published a theory in 2000 of the origin of HIV in chimps and who led this week’s study.
The report is important because it proves Hahn’s team developed “a very good way to, without invading or disturbing ecologically, study the evolution of the virus in this species,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, the National Institutes of Health’s leading AIDS expert. “It’s part of the big picture of really tracking down the origin.”
“To find this virus for the first time in the wild opens a window of opportunity,” added Hahn’s co-author, George Shaw of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
The closest relatives of the human AIDS virus are those infecting chimps in West Central and not in East Africa, Hahn said.
There are three different groups of HIV in humans, and while it is widely accepted that people probably caught the virus from chimps — probably by hunting and eating them — it was not known if several different subspecies of chimps living in different parts of Africa had perhaps passed on the virus independently.
Hahn first determined that HIV originated in chimps by testing the blood of a captive female, who lived with the chimp simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) for decades until her death from other causes.
Unlike human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), SIV does not have any apparent ill-effects on chimps.
But most captive chimps come from a small group of West African chimps. “We knew that if the study were to make sense, we had to look in the wild,” Hahn said in a telephone interview.
“The chimp range is huge. We had only a teeny little bit of information from captive chimps from one corner of Africa.”
But this posed a problem.
NEED FOR GENTLE TESTS
“We had to think long and hard ... given that chimps are so endangered. We had to look for noninvasive way of screening.”
To do that, they took tests that find antibodies to the virus in human urine samples and adapted them to use on chimp leavings in the forest. Then they teamed up with primatologists studying wild chimps that had come to tolerate their presence.
“We said ‘Listen, we would really like to do this screening — would you be willing to collect fecal and urine samples for us?,”’ Hahn said.
They worked with groups at the Gombe Research Center in Tanzania, in Uganda and in the Tai forest of Ivory Coast.
“We documented that this can be done, that you can study these chimpanzees in the wild without touching them, without bothering them,” Hahn said.
They screened 58 chimps and found just one infected with SIV — a healthy 23-year-old male in the Goodall colony in Tanzania. That’s farther east than tests on captive chimps had led scientists to believe the virus extended.
But the virus he was infected with was genetically very distant from human HIV.
This led Hahn to an interesting thought.
“The individual in Gombe is perfectly healthy. He is a young male in his prime. There is no indication that he is suffering from anything,” she said.
SIV may be a very old disease in chimps she said — unlike HIV, which probably first appeared in this century.
“Chimps may have 10,000 years of living with this virus,” Hahn said. “It may have been pathogenic at first, but evolution bred that out.”
In other words, the most deadly virus would kill its host early, while less deadly versions would survive for longer in longer-lived hosts.
“Chimps probably went through something several thousand years ago that we are going through now and they somehow learned how to handle it. They are at a point where we want to be — but we don’t want to wait 10,000 years.”
Chimps are between 98 and 99 percent genetically identical to humans, so the hope is they can be studied to find ways to make AIDS less deadly in people.
The chimp’s viral strain clearly isn’t very virulent — none of his sexual partners is infected, Hahn said. By studying why, maybe “we can get some clues that will help us combat HIV better in humans,” she said.
The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
For as funny as that guy used to be now he's just an A$$hole.
Not unless these people are eating fresh-killed chimp sushi. I don't think the HIV virus would survive in a cold or cooked chimp.
More likely cause: being bitten by an infected chimp while trying to pull him out of a live trap.
Moral of the story: don't share bananas with chimps!
Ok Bill..
"Who's plooking the monkeys?"
It is a self serving press release written up by PMSNBC.
Check this:
“It obviously confirms and extends the theory on the origin of AIDS,” said Beatrice Hahn of the University of Alabama, who published a theory in 2000 of the origin of HIV in chimps and who led this week’s study.
It's a press release for her crackpot theory, an infomercial.
I don't know if his theory panned out or not.
Or, while butchering the chimp, getting its blood on a cut or open sore on the catcher's body
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