The finding upsets a widely held scientific belief that chimpanzees, the closest relatives to humans, can get the simian AIDS virus but without harm.
The finding also suggests that an outbreak of AIDS is contributing to the declining chimpanzee population in Africa, said the leader of the research team, Dr. Beatrice Hahn of the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
She also said that comparisons of the viruses that cause AIDS in chimpanzees and humans could lead to new insights into the responses of the immune systems in both species.
“Our findings allow us to look at H.I.V. from a new angle, comparing and contrasting chimpanzee and human infections,” Dr. Hahn said in an interview. Her team’s study is being reported in the journal Nature on Thursday.
As researchers conducted autopsies on the bodies of the dead chimps they could find, they detected evidence of organ and tissue damage similar to that in late-stage human AIDS. Infected chimpanzees were also found to have a 10 to 16 times greater risk of dying than uninfected ones. Infected females were less likely to give birth. If they did, they could pass the virus to their infants, and they had a higher infant death rate than that of uninfected females.
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