The mountain gorillas that live in
Rwanda’s Volcanoes National Park have
frequent encounters with humans. On any given day, the animals might come
across smartphone-toting tourists, fecal-sample-swiping biologists or
antibiotic-administering veterinarians.
اضافة اعلان
So when the
coronavirus started spreading around the
world in early 2020, experts worried that people might unwittingly pass the
virus to the endangered apes, which are known to be vulnerable to a variety of
human pathogens.
“In the past, other human viruses have caused
respiratory illness in the gorillas,” said Kirsten Gilardi, executive director
of Gorilla Doctors, an international team of veterinarians that provides care
for wild gorillas.
“We were on pins and needles wondering, OK, if this
virus gets into the mountain gorillas, what’s it going to do?” Gilardi said.
In March 2020, in an effort to safeguard the
animals, Rwanda temporarily closed Volcanoes National Park. When the park
reopened a few months later, it had strict new precautions in place, including
requiring tourists and researchers to wear masks and keep their distance from
the gorillas. These rules, plus a general drop-off in tourism, mean that the
park’s gorillas have had relatively few close encounters with humans during the
pandemic, Gilardi said.
And so far, there have been no signs of the
coronavirus among the gorillas. But in trying to control an extraordinary
health threat, officials may have also alleviated a more everyday one: the
routine transmission of respiratory
diseases from humans to great apes. Since
March 2020, the number of outbreaks of respiratory illness among the park’s
gorillas has fallen to 1.6 a year, on average, from 5.4.
“The takeaway is these best-practice measures for
protecting great ape populations appear to be working,” said Gilardi, who
reported the findings in Nature this month. The report was cowritten by Prosper
Uwingeli, chief warden of Volcanoes National Park.
The analysis is preliminary, and the researchers
cannot prove that the gorillas’ health improved because humans kept their
distance. But the findings suggest that even after the pandemic wanes, stricter
controls may be needed to help protect endangered apes from catching diseases
from people, scientists said.
“The same types of things that can protect wild
animals that are susceptible to
COVID can also protect them from other human
pathogens,” said Thomas Gillespie, a disease ecologist at Emory University who
frequently works with wild primates but was not involved in the new research.
Just over 1,000 mountain gorillas remain in the
wild, divided between national parks in Rwanda, Uganda and the
Democratic Republic of Congo. Many gorillas have been deliberately habituated to humans to
help facilitate both research and ecotourism.
The apes face a variety of threats, including
poaching and habitat loss, but respiratory disease is also a major concern and
a leading cause of death in mountain gorillas.
Outbreaks of respiratory illnesses have become
common among the animals.
“They happen with regularity,” said Gilardi, who is
also a wildlife veterinarian at the University of California, Davis. “And we
don’t always know what causes them.”
Bacteria and viruses circulate naturally among
gorillas and other apes, some of which can cause respiratory infections. But
scientists have also documented numerous instances in which human pathogens,
including the rhinoviruses and coronaviruses responsible for common colds,
found their way into great apes.
In many instances, respiratory viruses cause
relatively mild, and familiar, symptoms in infected gorillas.
“They cough, they sneeze, they have runny noses,
they might have goopy eyes, they might be off their feed, lethargic, literally
not wanting to get out of bed in the morning,” Gilardi said. (Gorillas make,
and slumber in, night nests.) “They look and act just like we do when we have
an upper respiratory tract infection.”
But these outbreaks can sometimes cause severe
illness, including pneumonia, or even death. In 2009, a human respiratory virus
sickened 11 of the 12 gorillas in a single family group in
Rwanda. Five of the
animals required veterinary care and two others, including an infant, died.
Volcanoes National Park now requires tourists, park
personnel, researchers and other people encountering gorillas to wear face
masks, which had not previously been mandated. It also requires people to
remain nearly 33 feet away from the animals.
Tourism has not fully rebounded
either, Gilardi said.
The difference has been noticeable, she said: “We’re
just not seeing as much respiratory disease right now as we have in years
past.’”
Other great ape sites are currently collecting their
own data on how, and whether, the incidence of infectious disease has changed
since the beginning of the pandemic, Gillespie said. And the same precautions
can be used to help safeguard a wide range of wild primates, he added.
“Many of these best practices can be applied very
successfully to other endangered and threatened species,” Gillespie said.
“People need to be doing these things, COVID or not.”
Read more Lifestyle
.jpg)
.jpg)
