By Elizabeth Ross | Project Leader
Respiratory viruses of human origin are of great importance for the health of apes, never more than now in the middle of a corona virus epidemic which has the potential to be extremely problematic for great apes. In Uganda human pediatric viruses have caused multiple out breaks of disease in wild chimpanzees killing 15% of them. While we know that these potentially lethal viruses come from people we don't really understand their transmission pathways. Since July 2019 we have been continuously collecting clinical samples from school chidlren around Kibale National Park, Uganda and in parallel from chimpanzees that live in the forest.
Preliminary data support the idea of schools as reservoirs of disease, children taking viruses home and asymptomatic adults carrying them into the forest where they infect chimpanzees.
Once we have the parallel data from chimpanzees and we begin to understand how these viruses are transmitted across species boundaries, interventions can be designed to safeguard chimpanzees in sites where people and apes come into close contact eg tourist andf research sites.
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