Background: Catastrophic Decline in Ape Population

Over the last two decades the Ebola virus has killed about one third of the world’s gorillas and a number of chimpanzees. In the next decade, the death toll may rise to one half of the world gorilla population. Meanwhile, respiratory viruses transmitted from humans to apes are killing a growing number of wild apes. All is not lost. Human vaccines that would protect wild apes against Ebola and many other disease threats are already licensed or in the late stages of development. Learn More »

Need for Vaccination

Wild apes are now faced with two major disease threats: “naturally” occurring diseases and diseases introduced from humans. The former group includes both diseases that circulate persistently within ape populations and those that “spillover” from other wildlife reservoir hosts.

These diseases are of growing concern because threats such as poaching and habitat loss increasingly fragment apes into remnant populations that are too small to absorb the impact of disease. Magnifying the disease threat is the fact that both rising human populations on the edges of parks and the habituation of apes to human presence for tourism and research increase the rate at which wild apes are exposed to human diseases.

Our Strategy

Although the long term objective of VaccinApe is to vaccinate large numbers of wild apes against Ebola virus and other disease threats, we are taking an incremental approach in which we gradually build both technical expertise and stakeholder confidence that vaccination is a safe and cost-effective approach to ape conservation. After extensive consultation with our Scientific Advisory Committee, we have decided to divide this process into three distinct phases

Phase I

We are now in a “proof of concept” phase which will demonstrate that wild apes can be vaccinated safely, economically, and with rigorous assays of vaccination effectiveness. View More »