Gorilla HIV makes leap to humans
A new strain of HIV has jumped from gorillas to humans. So far, only one person, a 62-year-old French woman from Cameroon, has been found to be infected with the virus, which closely resembles strains of simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) recently discovered in western gorillas in the wild.
"It would be surprising if there aren't some more" human cases, says David Robertson, a bioinformaticist at the University of Manchester, UK who analysed the virus's DNA along with colleagues in France. "We don't think this is a direct gorilla-to-human transmission."
Until 2004, the infected woman lived in a suburb of Cameroon's capital city Yaoundé, where she didn't come into contact with apes or eat their meat – SIV's primary route to humans. This means that she probably acquired the infection from another human, likely through sexual contact.
