VARIOUS: FILE: New study in Science journal traces origin of AIDS to wild apes in Cameroon

Record ID: 402474

  • Title: VARIOUS: FILE: New study in Science journal traces origin of AIDS to wild apes in Cameroon
  • Date: 27th May 2006
  • Summary: (W3) UNIDENTIFIED LOCATION (FILE) (REUTERS) PEOPLE SUFFERING FROM AIDS CHILDREN SUFFERING FROM AIDS
  • Embargoed: 11th June 2006 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Topics: Nature / Environment,Health
  • Reuters ID: LVA3KDYPLATVNGODOE1ZDVTOMY3Z
  • Story Text: Researchers who picked up and analysed wild chimp droppings said on Thursday (May 26) they had shown how the AIDS virus originated in wild apes in Cameroon and then spread in humans across Africa and eventually the world.
    Their study, published in the journal Science, supports other studies that suggest people somehow caught the deadly human immunodeficiency virus from chimpanzees, perhaps by killing and eating them.
    Beatrice Hahn of the University of Alabama, who led the study, said the chimpanzee group that gave rise to HIV resides in Cameroon.
    In a telephone interview Hahn, who been studying the genetic origin of HIV for years, said this did mean the epidemic originated there.
    She explained the epidemic took off in Kinshasa and in Brazzaville. Kinshasa is in the Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly Zaire, and faces Brazzaville, in Congo, across the Congo River.
    Studies have traced HIV to a man who gave a blood sample in 1959 in Kinshasa, then called Leopoldville. Later analysis found the AIDS virus.
    In people, HIV leads to AIDS but chimps have a version called simian immune deficiency virus that causes them no harm. Humans are the only animals naturally susceptible to HIV.
    AIDS was only identified 25 years ago. The virus now infects 40 million people around the world and has killed 25 million. Spread via blood, sexual contact and from mother to child during birth or breast-feeding, HIV has no cure and there is no vaccine, although drug cocktails can help control it.
    And like so many new infections, AIDS appears to have been passed to humans from animals they slaughtered.
    SIV has been found in captive chimps but Hahn wanted to show it could be found in the wild, too.
    Her international team got the cooperation of the government in Cameroon and they hired skilled trackers.
    Up to 35 percent of the apes in some communities were infected. Not only that, they could find different varieties, called clades, of the virus.
    Hahn said some of the clades were "really, really very closely related" to the human virus and others were not.
    Chimps separated by a river were infected with different clades, Hahn said.
    And a river may have carried the virus into the human population.
    Hahn examined how to get between southern Cameroon and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and explained "some human must have done so. There is a river that goes from that southeastern corner of Cameroon down to the Congo river."
    Ivory and hardwood traders used the Sangha River in the 1930s, when the original human-to-human transmission is believed to have happened. Hahn's study suggests the virus passed from chimpanzees to people more than once.
    Hahn's study only applies the HIV group M, which is the main strain of the virus responsible for the AIDS pandemic.
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