I’d left Conakry, the sprawling, polluted capital, in a hired 4×4 with a driver. This, combined with Guinea being the seeding ground of the worst outbreak of human Ebola the world has ever known, made Guinea seem the ideal place for me to start my investigation. An estimated 20,000 chimps eke out an increasingly perilous existence here. Guinea has the largest population of chimpanzees in West Africa. Some conservationists have even, controversially, said that since the early 1990s a third of the planet’s wild chimpanzees and gorillas have been killed by the Ebola virus.Ĭhimpanzee in Guinea. For humans, the mortality rate stands at 50 per cent. An estimated 77 per cent of chimpanzees that catch the virus die of it and, in certain areas, a staggering 95 per cent of gorillas succumb to the disease. Certainly, the virus, which causes severe haemorrhagic fever in both humans and apes, is even more deadly for the great apes than it is for humans. Some scientists and conservationists though, suspect that right now, the single biggest threat to the continued survival of Africa’s apes is actually Ebola. Habitat loss is, most people assume, the biggest threat to chimpanzees, gorillas and bonobos, followed by the bush meat and exotic pet trade. China’s controversial security deal with the Solomon Islands.The best geographic documentaries to watch on Netflix.Why are some wild animals becoming self-domesticated?.Instead, I wanted to know about Ebola’s devastating impact on our closest cousins: the great apes of Africa. However, the already well-documented impact on humans wasn’t what I wanted to learn more about. In June 2016, the WHO announced that Guinea was finally free of Ebola and in October of that year, I flew to Conakry, the capital of this little-known Francophone nation to find out what I could about the impact of Ebola. It was the start of the 2014-16 West African Ebola pandemic, and in the months that followed TV screens around the world were filled with images of international medical workers treating the dead and dying across a swathe of West Africa. By the end of the month, his mother, elder sister, grandmother and the health care worker who’d tried in vain to help the family were all also dead. It was early December 2013, and in the village of Meliandou in southern Guinea, two-year-old Emile Ouamouno had been playing with a free-tailed bat he’d found on the ground. Chickens cluck busily about pecking at the dust and children run around playing tag. Its red-tinged mud huts huddle together under the shade of centuries-old jungle trees. The village is like a thousand others in Africa. This article is from our September 2017 edition – to access thousands of other fascinating stories dating back to 1935 get a digital subscription to Geographical Image: Stuart Butler The Ebola virus outbreak had an impact on not only humans, it also affected gorilla populations in the Congo and Uganda
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