http://msnbc.msn.com/id/12966623/?GT1=8199 Scientists trace AIDS origin to wild chimps Gene tests match virus in primates in Cameroon to first known human case
WASHINGTON - Twenty-five years after the first AIDS cases emerged, scientists have confirmed that the HIV virus plaguing humans really did originate in wild chimpanzees, in a corner of Cameroon.
Solving the mystery of HIV?s ancestry was dirty work. Scientists employed trackers to plunge through dense jungle and collect the fresh feces of wild apes ? more than 1,300 samples in all.
Spread to urban areas The first human known to be infected with HIV was a man from Kinshasa in the nearby country of Congo who had his blood stored in 1959
as part of a medical study , decades before scientists knew the AIDS virus existed.
Presumably, someone in rural Cameroon was bitten by a chimp or was cut while butchering one and became infected with the ape virus. That person passed it to someone else.
?How many different transmission events occurred between that initial hunter and this virus making it to Kinshasa, I don?t know. It could have been one, it could have been 10, it could have been 100,? Hahn said. ?Eventually, it ended up in an urban area, and that?s where it really got going.?
Somewhere in all that spread, the virus became more deadly to people than it is to chimps, who seldom are bothered much by SIV.
The research seems to settle any question of HIV?s origin, said Dr. Anthony Fauci, the National Institutes of Health?s AIDS chief.
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1 ) Wouldn't be suprised to find out ukuthi i Aids is part of " Medical Experiment" gone Wrong
2) The question is : Why are Chimps " seldom bothered by the virus ".