Study Finds Chimps Do Die From HIV-Like Virus, Bucking Long-Held Assumption

Scientists have long known that chimpanzees and other nonhuman primates can become infected with simian immunodeficiency virus, or SIV, a variant of HIV. It was thought, however, that only Asian macaque monkeys could die from the infection. But a new study published in Nature contradicts this assumption by finding that the virus can also be deadly to chimpanzees, humans' closest relatives. Some wild primates appear to have developed a way to keep SIV from becoming deadly, and scientists had hoped that studying chimpanzees could reveal how this mechanism works, possibly opening to the door to a human remedy. The new