Research
SHIV, a virus combining parts of the HIV and SIV genomes, was created for research purposes.
Beatrice Hahn of the University of Pennsylvania recently led a team of researchers to find that chimpanzees do die from simian AIDS in the wild and that the AIDS outbreak in Africa has contributed to the decline of chimpanzee populations. Testing wild chimpanzees, researchers detected organ and tissue damage similar to late-stage human AIDS. The infected chimpanzees had a 10 to 16 times greater risk of dying than uninfected ones; infected females were less likely to give birth, could pass the virus to their infants, and had a higher infant mortality rate than uninfected females.
The ICTVdB code of SIV is 61.0.6.5.003.
In 2010, researchers reported that SIV had infected monkeys in Bioko for at least 32,000 years. Based on molecular clock analyses of sequences, it was previously thought by many that SIV infection in monkeys had happened over the past few hundred years. Scientists estimated that it would take a similar amount of time before humans would adapt naturally to HIV infection in the way monkeys in Africa have adapted to SIV and not suffer any harm from the infection.
In 2012, researchers reported that initial infection of Rhesus monkeys by neutralization-resistant SIV strains could be partially prevented through use of an anti-SIVSME543 vaccine obligately including Env protein antigens.
Read more about this topic: Simian Immunodeficiency Virus
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