Use in AIDS Tests Imperils Chimps, Researcher Says

A researcher who has spent 27 years studying chimpanzees warned Sunday that the deadly disease AIDS is threatening the species with extinction because of increased demand for the animals in laboratory testing.

“Some (AIDS) researchers are saying we need hundreds and hundreds” of chimpanzees on which to test possible AIDS human vaccines, said Jane Goodall, 53, an English behavioral scientist who has been studying the behavior of free-ranging chimpanzees in Tanzania since 1960.

Primate facilities around the world “are breeding the animals,” Goodall said. “But if the panic is true, and hundreds and hundreds are needed, then not enough are being bred. This could lead to a drain on wild populations, which are already dwindling fast due to the destruction of their habitat.”

It is currently illegal to import chimpanzees from the wild, but the ban could be lifted in the event of soaring demand, she said.

Goodall said that capturing wild chimpanzees for research is devastating to wild populations because an estimated seven chimps die for every one that survives capture and transport.

Goodall said “opinion is divided on whether chimps are useful” experimental models of the human immune system’s response to the AIDS virus. Animals inoculated with the human virus so far show no signs of developing the disease, she said.

Goodall hopes that researchers will rapidly develop alternative ways of testing vaccines and treatments so that chimps would not have to be used at all in labs.