Kibale EcoHealth Project

Tony L. Goldberg & Thomas R. Gillespie
Co-Directors

Pathogens transmitted between wild non-human primates and humans pose a serious risk to both human health and wildlife conservation. Although we understand a great deal about the basic biology of these pathogens, we know very little about how and why they are transmitted between species. Evidence is nevertheless mounting that anthropogenic changes to tropical forest ecosystems are altering human and primate ecology in ways that facilitate interspecific disease transmission and emergence.

The overall goal of the Kibale EcoHealth Project is to determine how and why anthropogenic changes to tropical forests place people and non-human primates living in such ecosystems at increased risk of pathogen exchange. We test the central hypothesis that certain key human behaviors, primate behaviors, ecological conditions, and landscape features increase the risks of interspecific disease transmission. Understanding how anthropogenic disturbance affects interspecific disease transmission will lead to rational public health and conservation intervention strategies. These strategies will improve the health of humans living near primate habitats while also contributing to the conservation of the primates themselves. These strategies will also help prevent novel infectious diseases with primate origins from emerging out of environments such as equatorial Africa and affecting global human health.

Kibale EcoHealth Project is an eco-epidemiological investigation of disease transmission in humans and non-human primates in and around Kibale National Park, Uganda. We focus our investigations on a series of nine forest fragments that vary in the nature and degree to which anthropogenic disturbance has affected them. We take advantage of the natural variability among these fragments to understand how specific alterations to primate habitats affect the dynamics of primate-human interaction and the risks of zoonotic disease transmission. This effort entails a combination of epidemiology, molecular ecology, behavioral ecology, social and clinical survey, and spatially explicit modeling. The ultimate product will be an implementable plan for protecting the health of humans and non-human primates living in and around disturbed ecosystems, while simultaneously ensuring the sustainability of those ecosystems.