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 reported to be infected with the virus.
It very closely resembles strains of Simian Immunodeficiency Virus (SIV) recently discovered in western gorillas in the wild.
"It would be surprising if there aren't many 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." It is more likely to be the result of eating 'Bush meat', plus transmission via sexual activity.
Drug hope
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.
AIDS
The woman hasn't yet shown any sign of a compromised immune system, the hallmark of AIDS but tests on laboratory-cultured human cells suggest that the virus can replicate in the same white blood cells as other strains of HIV. However, the new virus should be susceptible to anti-retroviral drugs that slow the growth of other strains of HIV, Robertson says.
SIV
Based on its genetic sequence, the virus appears most closely related to a number of SIV strains collected recently in gorilla faecal samples from forests in Cameroon. These viruses also resemble "group O" strains of HIV, which infect far fewer people than other strains of HIV, most of them in Cameroon.
Original source
The discovery of a gorilla virus in humans could suggest that some of these group O viruses came from gorillas, Robertson says, but it's also possible that the virus originated chimpanzees and was transmitted independently to gorillas and to humans.
"Until we do more sampling we're also guessing a little bit," Robertson concedes.
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