Scientists have found more retroviruses (the class of viruses to which AIDS, among others, belongs) that have jumped from monkeys to humans.
THIS IS A SCARY THINGS THAT HAS HAPPENED BEFORE.
What I find interesting about an article reporting the fact that more retroviruses have made the jump is this remark:
"What’s increasingly clear is that the hunting and butchering of non-human primates is associated with the transmission of retroviruses to humans," says Nathan Wolfe, at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, US, who led the study.
No, duh!
We’ve been luck so far that the viruses that have jumped either haven’t been very harmful or haven’t been transmissible by casual contact. If we got something as deadly as AIDS that could be spread as easily as a cold, we’d be in serious, serious trouble.
Of course, if it could spread that easily in us, it’d probably spread that easily in monkeys, but you never know. It could mutate.
In any event, monkeys and apes are just too close to us genetically for us to be hunting them and eating their meat. Their DNA is too much like our DNA. Their diseases (including SIV/HIV) have just too great a likelihood of infecting us.
For an American, I’m adventurous in what I’ll eat (Durian fruit? No problem! I like the taste of burning rubber. Raw squid? Love the stuff! Ika sushi is a favorite!), but I wouldn’t eat monkey meat if you paid me. Don’t know what human-transmissible virus (including HIV) might be lurking in it!
So how to we get the bushmeat industry SHUT DOWN?
