I read with interest David Quammen's story "Deadly Contact" in the October issue of National Geographic. What I found puzzling and also disturbing is the fact that he mentioned SIV/HIV only once, in passing, on page 102. There is no longer any doubt that HIV is a zoonotic disease and that various strains of SIV have crossed the species barrier on several occasions and are probably doing so today in some of Central African forest patch. AIDS has killed and is killing more people then all the other zoonotic diseases mentioned by Quammen in the story and costs the world community directly and indirectly billions of dollars every year.

Might the explanation, for this sidelining of a a key aspect of this story, still have to do with the editorial policy which was explained to me by the editor in chief and the director of photography in a meeting in their offices in 1997, when the same story line was discussed: Mainly that Dr. Jane Goodall felt that linking chimpanzees with HIV and AIDS might be counterproductive and result in even more chimps getting killed. This was an illogical argument then and is an illogical argument today, especially reading the statement from the survivors of the Mayibout II Ebola outbreak in which they supposedly informed Mr. Quammen that none of the villagers had eaten chimpanzee since. (This it seems despite the press release, at the time, by the then health minister of Gabon, to the effect that : "People should not eat apes they find dead in the forest and not hunt any which behave strangely.." and by implication go ahead and hunt the healthy ones.)

Karl Ammann
Nanyuki, Kenya
September 21, 2007