CHICAGO. Feb 1: The HIV virus that causes AIDS was transmitted to humans from African chimpanzees, a team of US researchers from Alabama said here Sunday, citing evidence based on years of research. reports AFP.

Beathice Hahn of the University of Alabama at Birmingham told the opening session of a conference that brings together 3.200 AIDS researchers from around the world that her team had found evidence of transmission of sivepz (thed virus found in chimpanzees) to humans in at least three occa-

The team had confirmed the connection by analysing the blood and frozen tissue samples from a chimpanzee called Marilyn who had died from childbirth complications at a US private center at the age of 26 in 1984.

The Sivepz Virus — prevalent among chimpanzees living in Cameroon. Equatorial Guinea. Gabon and Congo — was found to closely resemble the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) • which causes the deadly Ac quired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS).

The chimpanzees are be-lieved to have been carrying the virus for hundreds of thousands of years but do not get sick from

This is an important finding with significant potential." said Anthony Fauci, a researcher at the US'National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, which helped bankroll the study.

Studying why the chimpanzees do not get sick might hasten the search for a cure, experts said.

Hahn said cross-species transmission of the virus probably occurred when a human ate chimpanzee bush meat, or a human was bitten by the ani-inal.

We speculate that this might be a route for Infection," Hahn told the conference on retroviruses and opportunistic infections. which ends Thursday.

Central Africans depend on bush meat as a source of food. And- there has been an increasing commercialisation of the bush meat trade as a result of logging Hahn said. This may have contributed to the spread of the epidemic, she said.