unfit for human consumption. As our closest cousins, chimpanzees carriers of diseases that can mutate into human plagues.
A controversial theory that the AIDS epidemic was accidentally started by Western health workers in Africa has been severely compromised by a new study of the origins of HIV. The results show that viruses like HIV can jump between closely related primates that eat each other, indicating that African markets in which monkey meat is sold could be a source of new diseases.
Stalking the evolutionary history of HIV has been a thorny issue. In 1999, researchers showed that the nearest ancestor of HIV-1, the most common of the AIDS virus, is a virus called SIVcpz, which seems to produce no symptoms in African chimpanzees. A controversial theory holds that vaccines against polio administered in Africa in the 1950s were accidentally tainted with SIV virus which then mutated humans to become HIV-1. Many scientists have criticized the improbable idea, but there was little evidence for alternative channels of transmission.
reports in the June issue 13 Science , a team led by Paul Sharp, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Nottingham, UK, argues that chimpanzees were HIV-1 virus precursor eating monkeys. A comparison of the amino acid sequences of four SIVcpz protein with other SIV strains reveals that SIVcpz was created by the merger of two strains that infect monkeys.
Like humans, chimpanzees are omnivores that hunt other animals when they can. The team says that chimpanzees could have been infected by eating freshly killed monkeys, leaving the two viruses mix their DNA. It is not known if SIVcpz mutated into something closer to the HIV-1 before or after being transmitted to humans. But what is clearer than ever, says Sharp, is that the virus can jump the line here.
"I am totally convinced," says Eddie Holmes, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oxford, UK "It shows that the butchering of animals is really a viable mechanism of viral transmission." L the study also avoids the theory that HIV was introduced by vaccination against polio, Holmes says, as chimpanzee meat sold in Africa is generally infected with SIVs.
Sites Related
home [Sharp
UN Web page on chimpanzees and the impact of their hunting
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