Science published a study today confirming what many AIDS researchers had long suspected — chimpanzees in the wild contract Simian immunodeficiency virus, though it is apparently very rare and the disease does not appear to harm the animals it infects. SIV had previously been confirmed only in captive chimpanzees.
Researchers developed a test that could determine if a chimpanzee had the disease by testing urine and feces — a very important development which allowed them to study the endangered wild chimpanzees without disturbing them. Researchers screened 58 chimpanzees in all, and found just one infected with SIV. The strain of SIV the chimp carried was very distant genetically from human HIV.
Beatrice Hahn, who led the research team, hypothesizes that the reason SIV does not kill the chimpanzees is that the disease is far older than HIV and chimpanzees have either adapted to the disease and/or the non-pathogenic version of SIV won out over their more pathogenic competitors.
“Chimps may have 10,000 years of living with this virus,” Hahn said. “It may have been pathogenic at first, but evolution bred that out. Chimps probably went through something several thousand years ago that we are going through now and they somehow learned how to handle it. They are at a point where we want to be — but we don’t want to wait 10,000 years.”
HIV-like diseases have been found in 26 different non-human primate species, but SIV in chimpanzees is the only one that is close to the human HIV virus.
Source:
Study Suggests AIDS Rare in Wild Chimps. Maggie Fox, Reuters, January 17, 2002.