To date though, these trials have not involved 'challenging' the vaccinated chimps with the live virus. Unlike for humans, a vaccine for gorillas and apes has been developed which thus far has been proven both safe and effective. As a short-term strategy, vaccination could prove enormously useful in tackling the Ebola crisis in apes. We need both short-term solutions to halting the spread of Ebola and long-term ones to prevent future outbreaks. Unfortunately, there appears to be a lack of political will to implement policies which would bring viable solutions into effect. 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. Since 2008, the IUCN has listed the Eastern Gorilla ( Gorilla beringei) as endangered and the Western Gorillas as critically endangered. Sadly, this prediction appears to have come true. Without aggressive investments in law enforcement, protected area management and Ebola prevention, the next decade will see our closest relatives pushed to the brink of extinction. There is also a growing body of evidence linking deforestation and subsequent changes in climate to the spread of Ebola and other infectious diseases.īack in 2003 an article on the decline of great apes, written by a team led by primatologist Peter Walsh, predicted that: 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. There are of course additional factors behind the declining numbers of Africa's great apes: illegal trading in wildlife and bushmeat, war, deforestation and other infectious diseases. It's hard to accurately count such elusive creatures but the WWF estimates there are up to 100,000 left in the wild – so a single Ebola outbreak wiped out a considerable chunk of the world's gorilla population. In 2002-2003 a single outbreak of ZEBOV (the Zaire strain of Ebola) in the Democratic Republic of Congo killed an estimated 5,000 Western gorillas ( Gorilla gorilla). In 1995, an outbreak is reported to have killed more than 90% of the gorillas in Minkébé Park in northern Gabon. Current estimates suggest a third of the world's gorillas and chimpanzees have died from Ebola since the 1990s.Īs with humans, these deaths tend to come in epidemics.

The virus is even more deadly for other great apes as it is for humans, with mortality rates approximately 95% for gorillas and 77% for chimpanzees ( Pan troglodytes).

Eastern chimpanzee mortality rate