#625 2003 · Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka / Conservation Through Public Health (Uganda) · Wildlife conservation / public health
Mountain gorillas kept catching human diseases, so the fix wasn't a stronger fence — it was better healthcare for the villagers next door
the problem
Mountain gorillas in Uganda's Bwindi Impenetrable National Park kept catching human diseases from the villages surrounding the park
background
Mountain gorillas at Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, once critically endangered, are genetically close enough to humans — roughly 98 percent similar — that human diseases can pass to them directly, and the gorillas were already habituated to ranging near the villages that border the park. In 1996, nine months into her job as Uganda's first wildlife veterinarian, Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka encountered a mysterious skin disease spreading through the gorilla population: hair loss, scaly white skin, constant scratching, and one infected baby gorilla that did not survive.
The standard conservation response to wildlife catching disease from a nearby human population treats it as a boundary-enforcement problem: keep people and animals apart, restrict local access to the park, treat the villages as an external threat to be managed at arm's length. Consulting a doctor friend about skin conditions common in low-income communities, Kalema-Zikusoka confirmed the gorillas had scabies, traced to mites on dirty clothing draped over a scarecrow at the park's edge — the disease had crossed from villagers to gorillas because the two populations were never actually separate to begin with.
what everyone would do
The standard conservation response to wildlife catching disease from a bordering human population is to treat it as a boundary-enforcement problem: restrict local community access to the park, keep people and animals physically apart, and manage the surrounding villages as an external threat to be contained rather than as part of the same health system.
what they saw
Kalema-Zikusoka saw that a fence-and-restriction approach treats the community and the wildlife as two separate systems in conflict, when the scabies outbreak had just proven the opposite: disease moved freely across that boundary in both directions, meaning the gorillas' health and the surrounding villages' health were never actually independent variables. The park's boundary was administrative, not epidemiological, so protecting the gorillas required improving the health of their human neighbors, not separating from them.
the move
Kalema-Zikusoka founded Conservation Through Public Health in 2003 on the insight that disease moves in both directions across the park boundary, meaning the surrounding community's own health was inseparable from the gorillas' health. Rather than build a fence between conservation and community welfare, CTPH built primary healthcare, family planning, and hygiene programs for the villages ringing the park, run alongside its gorilla health monitoring — treating both populations as one shared health system instead of enforcing a boundary between them.
why it works
Because gorillas and the surrounding villagers share disease exposure and even physical space, healthcare investment in the human population directly reduces the pathogen load that could cross to the gorillas, addressing the actual mechanism of harm rather than just restricting contact and hoping restriction holds. Because CTPH paired that health investment with a genuine share of tourism revenue and other economic benefits, communities that previously bore only the costs of conservation — restricted land use, lost livelihood — started experiencing conservation as something that materially helped them too, which reduced the resentment and desperation that had been driving risky, disease-spreading contact with the park in the first place.
the payoff
CTPH has engaged more than 50,000 local people in health and economic initiatives, and Uganda's mountain gorilla population has grown by more than 50 percent since the program began. Communities that had previously experienced conservation as a loss of land and livelihood began experiencing it as a shared benefit through healthcare access and a share of tourism revenue, reducing the friction that had been driving disease-spreading contact between people and gorillas in the first place; during the COVID-19 pandemic, community health task forces CTPH had already built helped prevent transmission to the gorilla population.
where it breaks
The approach depends on the harm genuinely crossing between the two stakeholder groups rather than one group simply being blamed for a problem that isn't actually shared — treating unrelated grievances as a single system when they aren't doesn't create the same alignment of incentives. It also requires sustained investment in the human-side programs to keep working; a one-time healthcare initiative without ongoing community engagement and shared economic benefit risks reverting to the same boundary-conflict dynamic once the initial goodwill fades.
what came after
Conservation Through Public Health is cited internationally as a model 'One Health' program linking human, animal, and environmental health, won the 2020 St Andrews Prize for the Environment, and Kalema-Zikusoka's approach has been credited with helping grow Uganda's mountain gorilla population from critically endangered status while building lasting healthcare and economic infrastructure for the communities that border the park.
references
- [1]To protect endangered mountain gorillas, this wildlife vet empowers their human neighborsCNN, 2026cnn.com
- [2]Gladys Kalema Zikusoka safeguards human health, and the world's rarest primatesNational Geographic, 2022nationalgeographic.com