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  National Geographic 7 Dec 06
Ebola Killing Thousands of Gorillas, Study Says
Kate Raviliou

Yahoo News 8 Dec 06
Study: Ebola killed gorillas too

PlanetArk 8 Dec 06
Ebola has Killed 5,000 Gorillas, Study Suggests
Story by Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor

WASHINGTON - The Ebola virus may have killed more than 5,000 gorillas in West Africa -- enough to send them into extinction if people continue to hunt them, too, researchers said on Thursday.

The virus is spreading from one group of the already endangered animals to another, the international team of experts report in this week's issue of the journal Science.

And it appears to be spreading faster than it is among humans.

"The Zaire strain of Ebola virus killed about 5,000 gorillas in our study area alone," primatologist Magdalena Bermejo of the University of Barcelona in Spain and at the Programme for Conservation and Rational Utilization of Forest Ecosystems in Central Africa and colleagues wrote.

Ebola hemorrhagic fever is one of the most virulent viruses ever seen, killing between 50 percent and 90 percent of victims. The World Health Organization says that it killed 1,200 people infected between its discovery in 1976 and 2004. The virus is transmitted by direct contact with blood, organs or other bodily fluids. There is no cure or good treatment, although several groups are working on vaccines.

Several experts have noted that chimpanzees and gorillas are also killed by the virus, and suspect that people may have caught it from infected apes -- perhaps when hunting them.

But it was not clear whether the gorillas were infecting one another, or being repeatedly infected and re-infected by another species of animal, perhaps a bat.

Bermejo's team had been studying a group of western gorillas in the Lossi Sanctuary in northwest Republic of Congo. "By 2002 we had identified 10 social groups with 143 individuals," they wrote.

QUICK DEATHS

In 2001 and 2002, several outbreaks of Ebola had begun killing people along the Gabon-Congo border. By October 2002, the researchers had found 32 dead gorillas, and of the 12 they tested for Ebola, nine were positive.

"She knew these animals individually, and in the course of three months they all died," said Peter Walsh, an ecologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, who worked on the study.

Eventually the researchers counted 221 dead gorillas. Based on what they and other experts knew, Walsh extrapolated what the total impact must be to come up with the estimate of 5,500 gorillas killed by Ebola in that area.

He said no one knows precisely how many gorillas are in the world and how many have died. "But I know what's the typical mortality rate in those areas that are affected. It's an educated guess. A quarter of the gorillas in the world have died from Ebola in the last 12 years. It's huge," Walsh said in a telephone interview.

"Add commercial hunting to the mix, and we have a recipe for rapid ecological extinction," the researchers wrote.

Their report supports a study published in July that showed gorillas were spreading the virus within their social groups.

"Our work is complementary to that -- we have shown it is spreading between groups," Walsh said. Walsh said gorilla groups share territories, often eating fruit from the same tree, although at different times. Feces from a sick gorilla could easily infect other gorillas. Gorillas and chimpanzees also touch and handle the bodies of other apes when they find them -- something known to transmit Ebola between humans.

"The issue here is that there is a certain amount of work that needs to be done to take these vaccines that already exist and put them into gorillas," Walsh said. "The price tag on that is a couple of million bucks." He hopes a rich donor will take up the cause.

Yahoo News 8 Dec 06
Study: Ebola killed gorillas too

WASHINGTON - Recent outbreaks of ebola among people in Africa also killed thousands of gorillas, animals already threatened by hunting, a new study reports.

Outbreaks in Congo and Gabon in 2002 and 2003 killed as many as 5,500 gorillas and an uncounted number of chimpanzees, a research team led by Magdalena Bermejo of the University of Barcelona in Spain reports in Friday's issue of the journal Science.

While conservationists had raised concern about gorilla mortality previously, Bermejo's study provides an estimate of how many died in the epidemic.

"Add commercial hunting to the mix, and we have a recipe for rapid ecological extinction," the researchers wrote. "Ape species that were abundant and widely distributed a decade ago are rapidly being reduced to a tiny remnant population."

Ebola hemorrhagic fever is marked by fever, headache, joint and muscle aches, sore throat and weakness, followed by diarrhea, vomiting, stomach pain ? and many suffer internal and external bleeding.

The researchers began studying gorillas in the region in 1995 and by 2001 were focusing on 143 animals who had become accustomed to having people around. In 2002, ebola flared in among people in the region, killing dozens, and 130 of the gorillas in the study also perished.

The researchers turned their attention to another group of 95 gorillas, but a 2003 ebola outbreak killed 91 of those animals.

That prompted the team to analyze the regional pattern of gorilla deaths and they concluded the disease spread primarily from gorilla to gorilla starting in the north and moving southward through the region.

They concluded that at least 3,500 gorillas died in the outbreaks and possibly as many as 5,500. They also found evidence of a large number of chimpanzee deaths but said they didn't have enough evidence to make an estimate of the total. The research was funded by Energy Africa Oil Company, the European Union and the University of Barcelona.

National Geographic 7 Dec 06
Ebola Killing Thousands of Gorillas, Study Says
Kate Ravilious for National Geographic News

The Ebola virus is marching steadily across western and central Africa, wiping out more than 90 percent of the gorillas in its path and threatening the species with extinction, a new study says.

About 5,000 gorillas were killed by the virus in one study area alone, according to results to be published in tomorrow's issue of the journal Science.

Ebola causes a hemorrhagic fever, resulting in massive internal and external bleeding that kills within two weeks of symptoms appearing. There is no known cure, and in humans the mortality rate is around 80 percent. The virus is named after the Ebola River in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, near where the first known outbreak occurred in 1976.

Ebola is moving at a rate of around 31 miles (50 kilometers) per year in western and central Africa, experts say. Most of the area's remaining gorillas live within about 124 miles (200 kilometers) of the current outbreak. "[Ebola] has already swept through two of the largest gorilla reserves and three or four of the smaller ones," said study team member Peter Walsh of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. "The outlook is pretty bleak."

Not Just Humans

Scientists have long known that apes were susceptible to Ebola. But until now they had no easy way to judge how serious the problem was. But the new research, led by Magdalena Bermejo from the University of Barcelona in Spain, clearly lays out the devastating effects of Ebola on gorillas.

Bermejo's team has been monitoring gorilla populations in the Lossi Sanctuary in the northwest of the Republic of the Congo since 1995. In October 2002 they began to find gorilla carcasses inside the sanctuary. Tests revealed that the gorillas had died from the Ebola virus. Within a four-month period 130 of the 143 gorillas the researchers were following had died.

Since then the scientists have followed gorilla populations throughout 1,500 square miles (4,000 square kilometers) of the surrounding area. Bermejo and colleagues estimate that more than 5,000 gorillas died in the area from the disease, with each Ebola outbreak resulting in greater than 90 percent mortality.

"A quarter of the gorillas in the world have died from Ebola in the last 12 years," Walsh told the Reuters news service. "It's huge."

Vaccine Hope

It is not yet clear how the virus remains hidden between outbreaks or spreads, Walsh said. But there are some indications that fruit bats may be the culprits.

"Add commercial hunting to the mix, and we have a recipe for rapid ecological extinction," the authors write in Science. "Ape species that were abundant and widely distributed a decade ago are rapidly being reduced to tiny remnant populations."

There is a glimmer of hope, however, Walsh added--a newly developed vaccine that has been shown to be effective at protecting laboratory monkeys from the Ebola virus. "If we can develop this vaccine for gorillas, then I think it is feasible to carry out a vaccination program," Walsh said.

He estimates that it would cost around two million U.S. dollars to develop the vaccine and around five million dollars to vaccinate a sufficient number of gorillas.
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