Word: gorillas
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...through New Faces of 1952. There are more than 30 tunes, some more familiar than others, and two comedy sketches - the first (the 1923 "The Yellow Peril") a one-gag item in which goldenrod flowers on the stage make all the actors sneezes they speak, the other (the 1949 "Gorilla Girl") about a jungle movie with very dumb starlet and a very smart gorilla. Both sketches cue you that, for just this once, Encores! is out to have a roaring good time...
...turns out that animal epidemiologists had based all their Ebola assumptions on mountain gorillas - the kind studied by Dian Fossey - and not on Western gorillas, which were actually dying. The mountain variety subsists mostly on leaves, which are available all over the forest. Western gorillas, by contrast, live mostly on fruit, a scarcer resource that draws different groups of gorillas and chimpanzees to the same trees at different times of day. "They defecate and urinate in and around the trees," says Walsh, leaving infected body fluids to sicken the next group. Gorillas also examine the bodies of dead apes they...
Unless, that is, you're a gorilla. Over the past decade or so, tens of thousands of the great apes have died of Ebola in central Africa, along with similar numbers of chimpanzees. That the disease was responsible was established in a paper published in December in Science. Now a report in the American Naturalist explains just why Ebola is spreading among the animals so furiously--and shows how it could be stopped, according to lead author Peter Walsh of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Leipzig, Germany. The epidemiological tactics used to treat outbreaks of human scourges...
...that the mechanics of the epidemic are known, putting the brakes on it could be comparatively easy. Ebola vaccines exist, but public-service announcements won't exactly bring gorillas to a vaccination center where the entire population can be inoculated. Instead, epidemiologists can use selective-vaccination techniques, which work with human communities when universal vaccination isn't practical. Just inoculate a few gorilla groups along the infection chain, and when the virus reaches them, it is stopped cold...
...talking about massive vaccination anymore," says Walsh. "We're talking about getting a vaccine into key gorilla populations." And the cost? Perhaps as little as $2 million--chump change, Walsh calls it, to save our closest evolutionary kin from extinction...