How are people getting AIDS from chimps and gorillas?

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.

SHOOT: I'm not sure why people can't eat fruits and vegetables and grains - why do they have to prey on other animals that can't be a natural diet choice for us? It's not natural for us to be consuming in the way we are, hence these new diseases.

clipped from www.newscientist.com 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.