![]() ![]() Assuming that COVID-19 has a natural reservoir in wild animals, now is the time to think again about humans’ relationship with and behavior toward wild animals.įlu-like respiratory diseases in wild chimpanzees and the 2003 epidemic at Bossou Bats in this family have previously been discussed as potential sources for Ebola virus outbreaks (Saéz 2015). The index case may have been infected when playing in a hollow tree housing a colony of insectivorous free-tailed bats ( Mops condylurus). The epidemic that occurred in West Africa stemmed from a single zoonotic transmission event to a 2-year-old boy in Meliandou, Guinea. It is believed that fruit bats of the Pteropodidae family are natural Ebola virus hosts (Leroy et al. The virus causing the 2013–2016 West African outbreak belongs to the Zaire ebolavirus species. There were no reported cases of Ebola-related deaths in wild chimpanzees in Guinea during that period. We also asked the local people not to enter to the forest and asked the Guinean authorities to stop ecotourism to prevent possible transmission from humans to chimpanzees. 2017), we put all fieldwork with wild chimpanzees in Bossou and Nimba on hold for 1.5 years, from April 2014 to November 2015. ![]() Since African great apes are vulnerable to Ebola as well (Leendertz et al. According to the WHO, the total number of confirmed and probable cases in the three countries reached 17,843, and 11,308 deaths were registered by March 2016. The outbreak started in Guinea and then moved to Sierra Leone and Liberia. The outbreak in West Africa was the largest Ebola outbreak since the virus was first discovered. The WHO reports the average EVD case fatality rate to be around 50%.įrom the end of 2013 to the beginning of 2016, there was an Ebola outbreak in Guinea, where I have been studying wild chimpanzees since 1986. The virus is transmitted to people from wild animals and spreads in the human population through human-to-human transmission. EVD first appeared in 1976 in a village near the Ebola River, a stream tributary of the Congo River in the Congo Basin, from which the disease takes its name. Ebola virus disease (EVD), formerly known as Ebola hemorrhagic fever, is a rare but severe, often fatal illness in humans. The COVID-19 outbreak we are facing reminds me of the Ebola outbreak in Guinea a few years ago. Bats, snakes, and pangolins have been suggested as possible reservoirs of the virus. The current outbreak of COVID-19 also draws attention to the food markets dealing wild animals in Wuhan, China, where the first infected persons were found. 2006) were the suspected reservoirs for the virus. ![]() 2005) and the horseshoe bat ( Rhinolophus cornutus) (Wang et al. In the case of SARS, which spread primarily in southern China, wild animals such as the masked palm civet ( Paguma larvata) (Wang et al. During the 21st century, several life-threatening viruses were introduced to humans from zoonotic reservoirs: this happened with severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 2002–2003 and, a decade later, with Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) in 2012. Thus, the CSG named it severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) (Gorbalenya et al. This virus was formally recognized by the Coronavirus Study Group (CSG), a working group of the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV), as a sister to severe acute respiratory syndrome coronaviruses (SARS-CoVs). The disease is caused by a virus that was tentatively named 2019-nCOV by the World Health Organization (WHO). All over the world, people are anxious about their friends, families, and colleagues. The numbers were doubled within 11 days on April 14. A total of 210,186 patients had recovered, and the number of deaths stood at 52,863. By the end of that day there were 1,011,490 confirmed cases globally, across 180 countries and regions. According to the Johns Hopkins University Corona Virus Resource Center ( ), the number of total confirmed infections exceeded 1 million as of April 3, 2020. The outbreak of COVID-19 began at the end of 2019 and became a pandemic in 2020. The infant named Jokro and her mother Jire ![]()
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