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HIV -- the virus that causes AIDS -- originated in wild chimpanzees in southern Cameroon, say a team of international scientists whose finding appears Friday in the journal Science.
"We're 25 years into this pandemic. We don't have a cure. We don't have a vaccine. But we know where it came from. At least we can make a check mark on one of those," research team leader Dr. Beatrice Hahn of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, told the Associated Press.
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As part of their research, she and her colleagues tested more than 1,300 samples of feces from wild apes. They were looking for antibodies to simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), the nonhuman primate version of HIV.
They found SIV in a subspecies of chimps in southern Cameroon. Some of the chimp communities there had infection rates as high as 35 percent, while other communities showed no sign of infection, the AP reported.
Hahn said that every chimp infected with SIV had a common base genetic pattern that indicated a common ancestor. The SIV strains found in the chimps in southern Cameroon are closely related to the most common subtypes of HIV-1, which is responsible for most of the worldwide epidemic.
The HIV epidemic may have started when a person in rural Cameroon was bitten by a chimp or was cut while butchering a chimp and became infected with SIV, and then passed it on to another person, beginning the cycle of human transmission.
The first recorded case of HIV was a man in Kinshasa, Congo, whose blood was stored in 1959 as part of a medical study.
"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 told the AP. "Eventually, it ended up in an urban area, and that's where it really got going."
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