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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Researchers who picked up and analyzed wild chimp droppings said on Thursday they had shown how the AIDS virus originated in wild apes in Cameroon and then spread in humans across Africa and eventually the world.

Their study, published in the journal Science, supports other studies that suggest people somehow caught the deadly human immunodeficiency virus from chimpanzees, perhaps by killing and eating them.

"It says that the chimpanzee group that gave rise to HIV ... this chimp community resides in Cameroon," said Beatrice Hahn of the University of Alabama, who led the study.

"But that doesn't mean the epidemic originated there because it didn't," Hahn, who has been studying the genetic origin of HIV for years, said in a telephone interview.

"We actually know where the epidemic took off. The epidemic took off in Kinshasa, in Brazzaville." Kinshasa is in the Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly Zaire, and faces Brazzaville, in Congo, across the Congo River.

Studies have traced HIV to a man who gave a blood sample in 1959 in Kinshasa, then called Leopoldville. Later analysis found the AIDS virus.

In people, HIV leads to AIDS but chimps have a version called simian immune deficiency virus that causes them no harm. Humans are the only animals naturally susceptible to HIV.

And like so many new infections, AIDS appears to have been passed to humans from animals they slaughtered.

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Originally posted by N.Beltov:
Vegetarianism is looking better all the time.

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In the first night's two-hour broadcast, The Age of AIDS begins with the medical and scientific mystery that emerged in 1981 when five gay men in Los Angeles were diagnosed with a new disease. The film documents the frantic search by American and European scientists and epidemiologists to find the source of the deadly infection as they tracked its spread among gay men, intravenous drug users, and hemophiliacs, and then into the general population. The trail led them back in time, from major American and European cities, to Haiti, and finally to the Congo.

"It has become incontrovertible," says virologist George Shaw, "that the HIV-1 virus that currently infects over 60 million humans arose as a consequence of a single transmission event from a single chimpanzee in West Central Africa to one human."

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