With all the breaking news on vaccines and variants I’ve barely had a chance to talk about this piece on microbes moving between humans and animals.
I think it’s important for the conversations we’re having around #sarscov2.
So, piece is here: https://t.co/P9EsrxZxGy
And a thread

I’ve long been interested in the way infectious diseases affect wild animals and what we can learn about human disease from this.
So in 2019 I joined @Leendertz_Lab on a research trip to Taï National Forest in Cote d’Ivoire, where he has been studying this for 20 years.

The research station in Taï goes back to Christophe Boesch and Hedwige Boesch-Achermann who came to the forest in 1979 to study the chimpanzees. It took them years to habituate the animals (get them used to humans). Ever since then, researchers have been following them.

In 1994, chimpanzees started dying. The researchers dissected one of the chimps on the dining table of their camp (they wore gloves, but no gowns or masks). A week later, a woman from the team fell ill (she recovered). It turned out to be a new species of Ebola: Taï forest Ebola.

It was a wake-up call, Boesch says today. Infectious diseases were clearly more important than zoology had taught him.
And he decided to get a vet to permanently track the animals’ health and study their infections. Fabian Leendertz took that job 20 years ago.