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Published online 22 July 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2009.711
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Wild chimpanzees get AIDS-like illness
Finding challenges long-held assumption.
Researchers have overturned a decade-old consensus that chimpanzees cannot fall ill as a result of infection with a virus similar to HIV.
Previously, scientists had thought that chimpanzees were like other non-human primates that can become infected with simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) — which is closely related to HIV — but do not go on to be seriously sickened by the virus.
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chimpanzees are not monkeys
Hope this discovery can do some good in treatment of AIDS.
Monkeys immonological features are very different from chimpanzeez and should not compare them.
Interesting finding - though not one that will do anything to help AIDS research. Most of the 85+ AIDS vaccines that failed in clinical trials worked in chimps. Chimps are not humans, HIV doesn't cause AIDS in chimps, and SIV is not HIV. This finding and others like it should not detract from a research focus on real people with real HIV; therein lie the findings that will lead to treatments.
I strongly believe that humans were given AIDS via African women employed in Africa to tend baby monkeys whose mothers had been killed by gunmen who collected babies to ship to the USA for use in labs and the space study (NASA),in the 60s. These ladies were known to breast-feed the baby monkeys and many subsequently were infected by "The Fever" . The animal supplier to NASA & US labs who purchased the young animals often wrote to the encampments in Africa, reminding keepers not to allow native women the breast-feeding of baby monkeys for fear of that "Fever" that was fatal .