Gorillas In The Midst Of A Pandemic

Close encounters with tourists may be exposing great apes to COVID-19.

- Stuart Blackman

New research shows that encounters between tourists and wild mountain gorillas are close enough to risk the transmission of infectious diseases – including COVID-19.

The current pandemic hadn’t hit when Magdalena Svensson and colleagues from Oxford Brookes University started monitoring photographs of wild gorilla encounters on social media. Their aim was to gauge how well tourists adhere to guidelines designed to minimise the risk of infecting the apes with human diseases.