London - Britain's biggest AIDS charity has hailed as a scientific milestone the discovery that chimpanzees were the original source of HIV.
Mr Andrew Ridley, director of operations at the Terrence Higgins Trust, said: "This is one of the most important developments in the history of HIV research." Experts believe that, because chimpanzees are genetically almost identical to humans, the breakthrough might help in the search for a vaccine against the AIDS virus.
An international team of American and British scientists traced the virus that has infected more than 30 million people worldwide to a subspecies of the chimpanzee in west Africa.
