Slashdot Mirror
New HIV Strain Discovered
reporter and barnyjr were among the readers alerting us to the discovery of a new strain of the HIV virus, found in a woman from the west central African nation of Cameroon. "It differs from the three known strains of human immunodeficiency virus and appears to be closely related to a form of simian virus recently discovered in wild gorillas, researchers report in Monday's edition of the journal Nature Medicine. ... The most likely explanation for the new find is gorilla-to-human transmission, Plantier's team said. But... they cannot rule out the possibility that the new strain started in chimpanzees and moved into gorillas and then humans, or moved directly from chimpanzees to both gorillas and humans. ... Researchers said it could be circulating unnoticed in Cameroon or elsewhere. The virus's rapid replication indicates that it is adapted to human cells, the researchers reported."
hunting and eating,
This is my sig, there are many like it but this is mine
During hunting most likely, get a cut from a branch/rock/weapon/etc, then get the blood from the gorilla in the cut, or get bitten/attacked by the gorilla itself. Could also be transmitted through eating (really I don't know fuck all about it), I imagine that a lot of people there (or "here" for that matter) have gum/teeth problems, perhaps an open wound or sore in the mouth from something, add that to improperly (or uncooked) meat, voila.
Sex, needle sharing, blood transfusion, or breast feeding. Take your pick.
Seriously... I'd guess biting or something like that. There's more here:
http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/resources/factsheets/transmission.htm
Good point.
You will notice that the places where such stories tend to occur are the same places where "witches steal men's penises" and the like. Somehow I find myself having doubts as well.
Somewhere, someone was either very desperate, brave, stupid or all of the above to be getting busy with a gorilla.
You forgot drunk.
Maybe the transmission happened when somebody ate the gorilla (or prepared the raw meat)? This seems more likely than interspecies sex.
It somehow seems relevant to be able to tell people which animal they should try to avoid. Chimpanzees ? Gorilla's ? Other types of monkeys or perhaps an entirely different animal ?
Dude, in some southern African countries the adult prevalence hits 20% The animal to avoid on that content appears to be: humans.
"Oh no... he found the
I wouldn't really say this requires any extra attention, it should just be good practice on a whole to try and limit/reduce exposure to direct forms of blood/fluid transfers when dealing with any animal.
We probably shouldn't hunt or eat primates at all though really. But any animal is a potential risk for infections. HIV might be the scariest, but there are others that are just as deadly.
the fate of all diseases and all parasites is equilibrium with its hosts. it does no good to kill off your host so quickly there's no retransmission.
That's very optimistic of you, but not at all how nature works. Yes, for a slow-enough action things will balance out. But there's nothing in nature to prevent a fast-spreading disease from wiping out an entire population.
The same is true of predators. A pack of wolves WILL eat the deer population to extinction in an area, and then go extinct itself if it can't find other meat. The wolves don't take a regular population tally and decide to cut back on meat and reproducing until the deer repopulate.
The best hope is that some deer manage to evade the wolves and repopulate while the wolves are starving to death and reproducing less.
While I agree that transmission was almost certainly not sexual, and very much agree that gorillas(as with most of the larger non-human primates) are not to be trifled with, I'm not sure your conclusion follows.
A dolphin could drown the best human swimmer with only modest effort; but swimming and interacting with them is pretty safe because they are (mostly) friendly social animals. Pissing them off would be a bad plan; but getting along with them isn't too hard. In a similar vein, trying to rape a gorilla would be a bad idea, it'd almost certainly maul and/or kill you. However, gorillas are fairly intelligent, moderately human-like, and have well developed social signaling mechanisms. Nothing prevents, in principle, someone from securing the gorilla's cooperation.