All in the family. A relative of the AIDS virus found in gorillas of Cameroon like this one, can be extended to a woman who now lives in Paris.
Cecile Neel
Researchers shake the family tree of HIV again. For the first time, researchers have found what looks like a gorilla version of the AIDS virus in a person. They do not know how the woman was infected, but suspects that other human host a similar virus. The possibility that gorillas can transmit the virus to humans also emphasizes the danger of slaughter monkeys or keep them as pets, which still occurs in some African communities.
Several studies have shown that the most common form of the human immunodeficiency virus, known as HIV-1, probably evolved from a chimpanzee relative, SIVcpz. When investigators reported 3 years ago they found a similar SIV SIVgor among gorillas in Cameroon, a genetic analysis suggested that he, too, got off SIVcpz. Now the SIVgor finding in a Cameroonian woman who moved to France 5 years ago further complicates the story.
In a paper published online this week in Nature Medicine , virologist Jean-Christophe Plantier of the University of Rouen in France and colleagues describe how a pain of 62 years, the fever and weight loss have sought medical attention shortly after arriving in Paris. The woman tested positive for HIV antibodies and suffered damage to his immune cells but has not developed AIDS. The laboratory Plantier, however, could not make copies of the virus, a standard diagnostic step in rich countries that quantifies the amount of HIV in a person's blood. He and his colleagues eventually managed using new reagents for the sequence of unusual strains of HIV. The virus they found was most closely related to SIVgor. "I am very surprised to find SIVgor in the human population," says lead author of the paper, François Simon, a virologist at the Saint-Louis Hospital in Paris.
Plantier said a key implication of study is that gorillas "could be potential reservoirs of a new HIV-1." the transmission of the virus between humans and gorillas "could occur much more often than we think," said David Robertson, a biologist computing at the University of Manchester in the UK, who carried out the analysis of the evolution of the virus. "the fact that we could pick up in Paris means that there must be more people with these types infections. "
Many researchers suspect that the main group of HIV-1 virus, called M, descended from a SIVcpz that moved the man there are several hundreds of years due to the slaughter or chimpanzees manipulate the living. But the woman in Paris reported that she had no contact with monkeys and do not eat wild game, called bush meat. She told her doctors that she had sexual partners in Cameroon after her husband died of an illness related to AIDS not in 1984, so it may have contracted the virus from another person.
The researcher whose lab discovered SIVgor among Cameroonian gorillas, virologist Martine Peeters of the University of Montpellier in France, warns that the woman's virus could eventually come from a chimpanzee infected gorillas and humans there are several years. "We have some samples from gorillas that we can not really tell if it is gorilla or chimpanzee came," said Peeters. She continues to analyze feces gorillas in Cameroon for new variants of SIVgor, only four have been described to date.
Although the new finding has no obvious practical importance for the treatment or prevention, it reinforces that even 25 years after researchers proved that HIV causes AIDS, many fundamental mysteries remain about the origin and spread of the virus.
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