Great ape health watch: Enhancing surveillance for emerging infectious diseases in great apes

Abstract

Infectious diseases have the potential to extirpate populations of great apes. As the interface between humans and great apes expands, zoonoses pose an increasingly severe threat to already endangered great ape populations. Despite recognition of the threat posed by human pathogens to great apes, health monitoring is only conducted for a small fraction of the world's wild great apes (and mostly those that are habituated) meaning that outbreaks of disease often go unrecognized and therefore unmitigated. This lack of surveillance (even in sites where capacity to conduct surveillance is present) is the most significant limiting factor in our ability to quickly detect and respond to emerging infectious diseases in great apes when they first appear. Accordingly, we must create a surveillance system that links disease outbreaks in humans and great apes in time and space, and enables veterinarians, clinicians, conservation managers, national decision makers, and the global health community to respond quickly to these events. Here, we review existing great ape health surveillance programs in African range habitats to identify successes, gaps, and challenges. We use these findings to argue that standardization of surveillance across sites and geographic scales, that monitors primate health in real‐time and generates early warnings of disease outbreaks, is an efficient, low‐cost step to conserve great ape populations. Such a surveillance program, which we call “Great Ape Health Watch” would lead to long‐term improvements in outbreak preparedness, prevention, detection, and response, while generating valuable data for epidemiological research and sustainable conservation planning. Standardized monitoring of great apes would also make it easier to integrate with human surveillance activities. This approach would empower local stakeholders to link wildlife and human health, allowing for near real‐time, bidirectional surveillance at the great ape‐human interface.

A review of Gabonese gorillas and their pathogens: Diversity, transfer and One Health approach to avoid future outbreaks?

“…This approach should therefore make it possible to build up a biobank of Gabonese gorilla pathogens, monitor any possible exchange with susceptible animals or humans in direct or indirect contact with these gorillas, and understand the environmental factors have led to this pathogen transfer. In the Gabonese context, with previous Ebola outbreaks that affected human populations, there is an urgent need to implement what Zimmerman et al (2022) have called "Great Ape Health Watch", which consist of standardizing surveillance across sites and geographic scales, which monitors primate health in real-time and generates early warnings of disease outbreaks (Zimmerman et al, 2022). In addition, the local population must be educated on the characteristics, ecology, and history of gorilla pathogens and the threats it poses to the wildlife and the human population in case of spillover (Kuisma et al, 2019).…”

Wild Chimpanzee Welfare: A Focus on Nutrition, Foraging and Health to Inform Great Ape Welfare in the Wild and in Captivity

“…While there is a guidebook on the best practices for monitoring health and diseases in great apes [ 61 ], it is not clear if all chimpanzee field sites collect long term data on chimpanzee health or enough data needed to estimate nutrition. Documenting health is an increasing trend and a wise one, considering the increased amount of research supporting disease transmission between humans and chimpanzees [ 61 , 62 , 63 , 64 ]. Noninvasive methods like the collection of biological samples such as fecal matter, urine or hair, biomarker identification, and DNA extraction techniques can determine levels of hydration [ 65 ], stress [ 65 , 66 ], parasite infection [ 67 , 68 ] or virus densities [ 69 ] Even though these methods are extremely insightful, the downside is that they can be costly and time consuming, with results taking weeks to months.…”

Internet search data with spatiotemporal analysis in infectious disease surveillance: Challenges and perspectives

“…This mainly results from the information revolution and the rise of Web 2.0, which triggered the use of the internet as a new tool to actively and frequently seek health-related information ( 14 ). Thus, disease activity can be estimated by collecting and tracking changes in frequencies of related internet searches for key terms ( 15 ).…”