Scientists believe they have found the missing link in the evolution of the virus that causes AIDS. If so, have reduced the gap between infection that does not harm most of the apes and which kills millions of human beings.
This link is a virus that is killing chimpanzees in the wild at an alarming rate, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Nature.
Chimpanzees are primates also the first human beings who become ill in the jungle in a significant number with a virus related to HIV. Chimpanzees are also the closest beings to humans among primates.
Chimpanzees are already in danger, but the discovery of the disease that kills these apes could help doctors find better treatments or a vaccine for humans, experts say.
version of the virus that causes AIDS from monkeys is known as simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), but most of apes and monkeys that have revealed no symptoms or become ill.
So "if we can figure out why the monkeys do not get sick, maybe we could apply to humans," said study lead author Beatrice Hahn, professor of medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
The nine-year study of chimpanzees in the wild in Gombe National Park in Tanzania found that chimpanzees infected with SIV were dying at a rate of 10 to 16 times higher than non-infected chimpanzees.
Necropsy of infected chimpanzees revealed an unusually low amount of protein on T cells in white blood cells that are similar to levels found in humans with AIDS, Hahn said in a telephone interview.
When scientists looked at the particular strain found that it was the closest to the virus that first infected humans.
"From an evolutionary standpoint and epidemiological data may be considered a 'missing link' in the history of the HIV pandemic," wrote the AIDS researcher Dr. Daniel Douek of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in an email . Douek not participate in the study of Nature.
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