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Believed to be the first time scientists have detected simian immunodeficiency virus not linked to chimpanzees
Gorillas linked to new chain of HIV
New strain of HIV discovered linked to gorillas
Scientists in Europe have discovered a new strain of HIV and linked it to gorillas, unlike all three other known strains of the human immunodeficiency virus HIV-1, which have been linked to chimpanzees. They believe that the most likely explanation for the new virus's emergence is gorilla-to-human transmission via the slaughtering of apes or handling or eating their meat, although the possibility exists that the chimpanzee virus linked to HIV-1 was transferred to gorillas and then to humans, or directly transferred to humans and then to gorillas.
Their report in Nature Medicine says that the new virus strain was isolated in 2004 from a Cameroonian woman upon her arrival in Paris. She lived in a near-urban part of Cameroon's capital Yaounde, and said that she had no contact with apes or their meat, leading the report's authors to presume that she was infected through sex, and suspect that there are additional undetected cases. The woman has a high amount of the virus in her blood, but the number of CD-4 blood cells, a critical measure of the progression of AIDS, is stable at about 300 per cubic millimetre. However, the new virus may escape detection by standard blood and laboratory tests for HIV-1.
