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.
Treated villagers and gorillas as one health system, running primary care alongside gorilla monitoring so human health gains cut pathogen spillover.
Disease crossed freely between villagers and gorillas, so separating them couldn't stop transmission.
Improving village healthcare reduced the pathogen load that could jump to gorillas.
Sharing tourism revenue made conservation a benefit, not a cost, to villagers.
Community health workers built for gorilla protection also prevented COVID-19 transmission.
When harm crosses a boundary in both directions, solve it as one shared system rather than enforcing the boundary.
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.
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The sources
- To protect endangered mountain gorillas, this wildlife vet empowers their human neighbors CNN · cnn.com
- Gladys Kalema Zikusoka safeguards human health, and the world's rarest primates National Geographic · nationalgeographic.com