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From: tmb@ai.mit.edu (Thomas M. Breuel)
Newsgroups: sci.med.aids
Subject: Re: Animals as HIV vectors
Message-ID: <1991May3.105458.7668@cs.ucla.edu>
Date: 3 May 91 04:26:15 GMT
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In article <1991May2.101743.27040@cs.ucla.edu> jfh@netcom.COM (Jack Hamilton) writes:
   >Can animals carry the aids virus? For example, if an animal bites an HIV+
   >person, can they transmit the virus?

   Second, HIV doesn't reproduce in animals 
   other than humans (that's one reason why testing drugs and vaccines
   is so difficult - human subjects are needed), so the virus would have to be
   left over from the first bite.

That's false. HIV can replicate in several other species besides
humans. There is, in fact, increasing evidence that precursors of
the HIV virus may have been transmitted to humans independently
several times in this century and before.

The difficulty with vaccine studies in animals is not that the virus
can't infect them, but that it is difficult to evaluate how the level
of protection a vaccine confers upon an animal translates into
protection of humans.