An Aids-like virus has been found in African hunters who have eaten ape meat which is being sold illegally in the UK.

A leading scientist has told the File On 4 programme that the virus was probably passed on to tribesmen via body fluids when the animals were slaughtered and butchered.

Assistant Professor Nathan Wolfe, who tested more than 1,000 pygmy hunters for Johns Hopkins University, found a retrovirus from the same family as HIV in a number of them.

“This is the area of the world where HIV came from, and this is most likely the mechanism by which HIV emerged into the human population,” he said.

Although the full public health implications are still unknown, the fear is that the new disease will have global impact.

UK imports

The File On 4 team accompanied environmental health officers to spot inspections at London shops where they found meat from endangered species from West and Central Africa.

About 5,000 tonnes of bush meat, which originates from animals such as antelopes, snakes, gorillas and elephants, is eaten in Africa every year.

It is estimated that 12,000 tonnes of the meat is smuggled into the UK, although customs only seize 72 tonnes annually.

There may also be serious implications for the health of the British domestic livestock as the foot and mouth outbreak was linked to illegal meat imports in 2001.

Under cover

Posing as rich white loggers, File On 4 journalists travelled to Cameroon where pygmy hunters offered to kill gorillas, seen as the best meat, for 800 francs an animal.

The journalists were offered the skull, palms, and legs of the gorilla free of charge as long as they could provide the bullets to shoot it.

They were accompanied by an undercover worker from Cameroon’s Last Great Ape project who said: “They have killed so many gorillas we cannot tell you exactly how many.”

Abject poverty forces such hunters to kill any animal, no matter how rare or unfit for human consumption, and transport it out of the country through black markets.

The discovery of the bushmeat virus was first reported by Dr Wolfe in the Lancet in March 2004 but as yet there is no proof that anyone has died from the virus.