Study Proves Chimps Can Die From AIDS

Boston (DbTechNo) - It appears that chimps can indeed die from the AIDS virus, a blow to those proponents of the monkeys being immune to the disease.

This news comes to us from primatologists working in Gombe National Park in Tanzania.

They studied up to 94 chimps for up to 9 years and state that at any given time between 10 and 20 percent of them had a type of simian immunodeficiency virus.

Because tracking the disease in chimps is not an easy thing to do, researchers had to rely on stool samples taken from the chimps to keep track of which ones had the virus and which ones did not.

They noted that chimps with the virus were far more likely to die than chimps not infected with the virus.

Because chimps are so closely related to humans, researchers say that it would not be hard for the AIDS virus to mutate into a form that could be contracted by the human race.

“SIVcpz, like HIV-1 in humans, has a substantial negative impact on the health, reproduction and lifespan of chimpanzees in the wild,” Hahn wrote in the journal Nature. “The assumption was made that all primates are the same and it isn’t true.”