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PANEL
Eric Chivian, M.D., Director, Center for Health and the Global Environment, Harvard Medical School
Introduction and Overview
Stuart Pimm, Ph.D., Professor of Conservation Biology, Columbia University
The Concept of "Biodiversity Hotspots"
Robert Engelman, Vice President for Research, Population Action International
Population Pressures in "Hotspots"
Jane Goodall, Ph.D., C.B.E., Founder and Trustee, The Jane Goodall Institute for Wildlife Research, Education, and Conservation
The Practice of "Bushmeat" in West African Forests
Beatrice H. Hahn, M.D., Professor of Medicine, University of Alabama at Birmingham
SIV-Infected Primates as Sources and as Models for Understanding HIV/AIDS
The diversity of life on Earth tends to be concentrated on land in some twenty-five areas designated as "biodiversity hotspots." While making up only 1.4 percent of the total land surface, these areas contain large proportions of its species, for example, more than one third of all known mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians. Often, they are also sites of high human population density and growth, and species in these regions, therefore, may be particularly at risk.
This briefing focused on one such hotspot - the West African Forests region - and will look at the slaughter of chimpanzees, gorillas, and other primates for "bushmeat" as an example of how species may be endangered by human activity, and how the loss of our closest relatives may have significant implications for human health.
It is believed that a sub-species of chimpanzee in west-central Africa may be the original source of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and that transmission of the virus, a simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), to humans was the result of blood exposures from the handling of chimpanzees killed by hunters. New research has identified other SIVs in other African primate species, raising the possibility of additional exposures. The extensive killing of primate species, therefore, not only threatens many of them with extinction, but may also result in new human HIV-like infections in the future that may originate in wild primate populations.