One fear commonly expressed by primatologists is that vaccination will either injure apes or “stress them out”, thereby, making them more susceptible to disease or intolerant to the approach of researchers or tourists. Some of these fears appear to be driven by the mistaken assumption that vaccination would entail anestheticizing and handling apes. This is simply not the case. Vaccine can be delivered without “knocking down” the animal. This not only eliminates the risk of death under anesthesia, it limits stress to a brief window after the animal is struck by a dart. This very brief window of stress seems unlikely to have a major immunosuppressive effect. Negative effects on wild ape tolerance to humans may also be minimized by concealing the shooter, as wild gorillas and chimpanzees appear not to immediately associate the dart with the darter. One of the attractions of oral vaccination is that induces no stress other than, perhaps, that associated with the presentation of a novel item (i.e. neophobia). Furthermore, new darting technologies greatly reduce the potential for puncture wounds or tissue damage at the injection site.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 10th, 2009 at 4:11 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.