Deadly contact

Abstract

[...] are yellow fever, monkeypox, bovine tuberculosis, Lyme disease, West Nile fever, Marburg, many strains of influenza, rabies, hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, and a strange new affliction called Nipah, which kills pigs and pig farmers in Malaysia. Some of thosenotably rabies-are widespread and famously lethal, still killing humans by the thousands despite centuries of effort at coping with their effects, concerted international attempts to eradicate or control them, and a clear scientific understanding of how they work. Others are new and inexplicably sporadic, claiming a few victims (as Hendra did) or a few hundred in this place or that, and then disappearing for years. Any of them might be carried by a tourist, a researcher, or a local person, with potentially devastating impacts on a tiny, isolated population of great apes with a relatively small gene pool, such as the mountain gorillas of Rwanda or the chimps of Gombe.