Credit: AFP
PARIS: French virologists say they had found a new subtype of the AIDS virus that appears to have jumped the species barrier to humans from gorillas.
The new strain, found in a woman from Cameroon, West Africa, is part of the HIV-1 group of viruses that account for the vast majority of cases of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), they said.
Until now, all have been linked to the chimpanzee.
The new subtype has been called P, adding to three established HIV-1 subtypes: M, by far the most prevalent, and O and N, which are rare.
New subtype
There is also an HIV-2, which is less common and is also suspected to have origins in non-human primates.
The virus was sequenced from a blood sample taken from an unnamed 62-year-old woman who moved to Paris from Cameroon, according to a paper published by the journal Nature Medicine.
In 2004, shortly after moving to the French capital, the woman was tested for HIV. She responded to diagnostic tests for HIV-1 but further tests failed to pinpoint the viral subtype.
The virus was genetically decoded and then put through a computer model to compare its evolutionary past against known viruses, both HIV and its equivalent in apes, called simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV).
Significant match
The strain was a "significant" match with SIVgor – an immune deficiency virus found in gorillas. "The most likely explanation for its emergence is gorilla-to-human transmission of SIVgor," the study says.
The research was headed by Jean-Christophe Plantier at a national referencing laboratory for HIV at the Rouen Hospital Centre in northwest France.
HIV is believed to have jumped from humans from their closest animal relatives more than a century ago, in west-central Africa.
Analysis of tissues preserved by doctors in the colonial-era Belgian Congo shows that HIV-1 began spreading among humans at some point between 1884 and 1924, according to an investigation published last October. But until now, the known vector has been the chimpanzee.
How Gorillas pass HIV strain to Humans
Clearly, although gorillas have been maligned as agressive man-killers, they are now well known to be shy animals that avoid humans. I can't imagine a gorilla going out of its way to attack humans unless humans initiated the conflict. Knowing the current taste for bushmeat, I would assume that humans unknowingly infected themselves as they slaughtered, butchered and consumed one of our critically endangered distant cousins.