Ebola has wiped out 1/3 of the World’s Great Apes/Gorillas!

Ebola poses the greatest threat to the survival of our nearest cousins — gorillas and chimps, a third of which have died from the deadly virus since the 1990s.

The disease is even deadlier for the great apes than it is for humans, according to the report in The Conversation, a nonprofit media outlet.

Mortality rates for gorillas are about 95 percent and 77 percent for chimpanzees. For humans, it is about 50 percent.

Meera Inglis, a doctoral candidate in conservation policy at the University of Sheffield, wrote that as with humans, deaths among the apes come in epidemics.

An outbreak in 1995 killed more than 90 percent of gorillas in a park in Gabon. In 2002-03, another outbreak killed about 5,000 gorillas in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
There are only about 100,000 gorillas left in the wild, Inglis reported.

The great apes also are decimated by illegal trading in wildlife, deforestation, wars and other infectious diseases.
“The world’s remaining wild apes are being increasingly forced into isolated pockets of forest, which impedes their ability to forage, breed and to hide from hunters,” she wrote.

“If we do not act fast, these may prove to be the last decades in which apes can continue to live in their natural habitat,” she added. “Unfortunately, there appears to be a lack of political will to implement policies which would bring viable solutions into effect.”

A safe and effective vaccine has already been developed for apes, she wrote, but “trials have not involved ‘challenging’ the vaccinated chimps with the live virus.”

“Across much of Europe, medical research on great apes is either banned or highly restricted because of their cognitive similarity to humans,” she wrote. “The question is whether or not we should make an exception in this case.”

Credit: NY Post