Chimps and gorillas are Ebola's unseen victims
While the World Health Organization sees hopeful trends, Ebola is still spreading in West Africa. And even as our interest here in the U.S. flags, there is a side to the story that has scarcely been told at all.
Ebola is devastating primate populations.
Meera Inglis, a Ph.D. student at the University of Sheffield, raised the issue on The Conversation, pointing to research that has found that the disease has wiped out an estimated one-third of the world's gorillas and almost the same proportion of chimps.
"At this moment in time Ebola is the single greatest threat to the survival of gorillas and chimpanzees," Inglis wrote.
Ebola has been spreading in great ape populations for decades. Because they are so similar genetically, it should be no surprise that the disease can flare in human and non-human primate populations in tandem. A series of outbreaks that affected humans in Gabon in the early 90s was linked back to a protracted outbreak among chimps and gorillas that killed thousands of animals. Around the same time, Ebola caused the deaths of at least 25 percent of the chimpanzees in the Ivory Coast's Tai Forest.
A 2006 paper by ape researcher Peter Walsh in the journal Science found that Ebola outbreaks in Congo in 2002 and 2003 spread to a nearby gorilla population, killing at least 5,000 gorillas. The animals saw a dramatic 95 percent mortality rate. Chimpanzees in the area were affected, too -- 77 percent died.
At that time, Walsh published a study in Nature arguing that Ebola rivaled hunting as the leading threat to chimps and gorillas in Congo and Gabon.
He has since worked to develop an effective vaccine to protect great apes in the wild. He published results of successful trials in 2014, but that's about as far as the efforts get.
Short of a vaccine, Inglis posited that conservation efforts to restore apes' forest habitats could help quell the spread of Ebola by reducing the chances of infected animals coming into contact with neighboring populations.
"If we do not act fast," she wrote, "these may prove to be the last decades in which apes can continue to live in their natural habitat."