Chimpanzee Reservoirs of Pandemic and Nonpandemic HIV-1 Title and link to Science abstract
Posted on 05/25/2006 9:40:17 PM PDT by neverdem
By studying chimpanzee droppings in remote African jungles, scientists reported yesterday, they have found direct evidence of a missing link between a chimpanzee virus and the one that causes human AIDS.
Scientists have long suspected that chimpanzees are the source of the human AIDS pandemic because at least one subspecies carries a simian immune deficiency virus closely related to H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS.
But because the simian virus, known as S.I.V.cpz, was identified in chimpanzees in captivity, researchers could not be sure that the same simian virus existed among these apes in the wild.
It does, the team of American, European and Cameroonian scientists reported in the journal Science. They found it by testing hundreds of chimpanzee droppings collected in Cameroon.
The genetic and immunologic tests were developed in stages over the past seven years to help trace the evolution of H.I.V. and solve the mysterious origins of AIDS, said Dr. Beatrice H. Hahn, a virologist at the University of Alabama in Birmingham. Dr. Hahn led the international team that conducted the study, which combined genetics and epidemiology.
The new findings, she said in a telephone interview, do not explain the entire chain of events that led from the first human H.I.V. infection to the infection of 65 million people around the world.
But, Dr. Hahn reported, her team's findings show "for the first time a clear picture of the origin of H.I.V.-1 and the seeds of the AIDS pandemic." H.I.V.-1 is the virus that causes the vast majority of AIDS cases in the world. The first cases of AIDS were detected in the United States in 1981.
Studies estimate that the human AIDS virus jumped species 50 to 75 years ago. But no one knows who the first infected person was or how that person acquired H.I.V...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
quit monkeying around...
Maybe they don't have goats in that part of the world.
Folks in that part of the world eat those critters. It's called bushmeat.
ping
rotten sometimes but they eat it...
Ingestion. ....I guess I feel better now.
More likely knicking oneself cutting one up to eat.
Reading the first article on the subject this afternoon, even before it got on FR I knew people would be strangely obsessed with the weird idea that people got it from having sex with chimpanzees instead of the obvious cause which is the widespread practice of butchering and eating them.
Pretty close geographically to the areas that break out with Ebola and Lassa occasionally.
Probably not the way everyone is thinking. A chimpanzee can easily tear a man's arms off. Screwing them would probably prove difficult.
What's so weird about assuming that it was spread by people making whoopee with monkeys? That sounds almost normal compared to some sexual appetites in the proccess of being main streamed these days.
Here's more:
From this source.
In his book, The River, the journalist Edward Hooper suggested that HIV could be traced to the testing of an oral polio vaccine called Chat, given to about a million people in the Belgian Congo , Ruanda and Urundi in the late 1950s. To be reproduced, live polio vaccine needs to be cultivated in living tissue, and Hooper's belief is that Chat was grown in kidney cells taken from local chimps infected with SIVcmz. This, he claims, would have resulted in the contamination of the vaccine with chimp SIV, and a large number of people subsequently becoming infected with HIV-1.
There's more about it on that site. Scientists discredited his work, but he could've been on to something.
Thanks for the info. Do you have any reliable links on that?
Hows Jane Goodall?
I would bet that 'monkey' would resist such, if capable (I know, don't go there.): 'monkeys' have better taste...
...and may 'taste better': fwiw, my bet is on the bushmeat/butchering connection, which has been postulated as a vector for Marburg and Ebola as well.
Cameroon!
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