Scientists believe they have found a “missing link” in the evolution of the virus that causes AIDS. It bridges the gap between the infection that does no harm to most monkeys and the one that kills millions of people.
That link is a virus that is killing chimpanzees in the wild at a disturbingly high rate, a study in yesterday’s journal Nature said.
Chimpanzees are the first primate besides man shown to get sick in the wild in significant numbers from a virus related to HIV. Chimps are also man’s closest relative among primates and they are already endangered.
The discovery of the disease killing chimps may help doctors come up with better treatments or a workable vaccine for humans, experts said.
The monkey version of the virus that causes AIDS is called simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), but most apes and monkeys that have it show no symptoms or illness.
“If we could figure out why the monkeys don’t get sick, perhaps we could apply that to people,” said study lead author Beatrice Hahn, a professor of medicine at the University of Alabama, Birmingham.
The nine-year study of chimps in their natural wild habitat at Gombe National Park in Tanzania found chimps infected with SIV had a death rate 10 to 16 times higher than uninfected chimps. Necropsies of dead infected chimps showed unusually low counts of T-cell white blood proteins that are just like the levels found in humans with AIDS, Hahn said in a phone interview.
When scientists looked at the particular strain, they found that it was the closest relative possible to the virus that first infected humans.
“From an evolutionary and epidemiological point of view, these data can be regarded as a ‘missing link’ in the history of the HIV pandemic,” AIDS researcher Daniel Douek of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases wrote in an e-mail.
Douek was not involved in the Nature study.
Monkeys and apes — except for chimps — seem to survive the virus because of some kind of evolutionary adaptation, probably on the cell receptors, Douek wrote. The infection of chimps is more recent so they haven’t adapted.
Hahn said chimps and people probably caught the virus the same way, by eating infected monkeys, and they both spread it the same way, through sexual activity.
Many factors are causing Africa’s chimp population to dwindle, said study co-author Michael Wilson, a professor of anthropology at the University of Minnesota and former director of field research at the Jane Goodall Institute in Tanzania.
Hunting, loss of habitat and disease are decreasing chimp numbers and it’s hard to figure out how much of a factor SIV is, Wilson said.
“It is a concern,” he said. “The last thing these chimps need is another source of mortality.”
Wilson, who spent years observing chimps in Tanzania as part of the study, said that when researchers realized the virus was fatal and they knew which chimps were infected, it became hard to watch some of their activities in the wild.
He recalled wanting to warn one female chimp: “Don’t mate with those guys.”
“But, of course, I can’t do that,” Wilson said.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
Eleven people, including a former minister, were arrested in Serbia on Friday over a train station disaster in which 16 people died. The concrete canopy of the newly renovated station in the northern city of Novi Sad collapsed on Nov. 1, 2024 in a disaster widely blamed on corruption and poor oversight. It sparked a wave of student-led protests and led to the resignation of then-Serbian prime minister Milos Vucevic and the fall of his government. The public prosecutor’s office in Novi Sad opened an investigation into the accident and deaths. In February, the public prosecutor’s office for organized crime opened another probe into
RISING RACISM: A Japanese group called on China to assure safety in the country, while the Chinese embassy in Tokyo urged action against a ‘surge in xenophobia’ A Japanese woman living in China was attacked and injured by a man in a subway station in Suzhou, China, Japanese media said, hours after two Chinese men were seriously injured in violence in Tokyo. The attacks on Thursday raised concern about xenophobic sentiment in China and Japan that have been blamed for assaults in both countries. It was the third attack involving Japanese living in China since last year. In the two previous cases in China, Chinese authorities have insisted they were isolated incidents. Japanese broadcaster NHK did not identify the woman injured in Suzhou by name, but, citing the Japanese
RSS