A Surprising New Way People Can Protect Gorillas
To keep Uganda’s gorillas healthy, an innovative veterinarian is focusing on their neighbors first.
In spring 2020, as COVID-19 erupted worldwide, Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka feared less for her own health than for the mountain gorillas in Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, 120 square miles of misty rainforest in Uganda’s southwest corner. Around 40,000 tourists visit Bwindi annually, bearing pathogens from around the world. In 2009 a pair of Rwandan gorillas died from a respiratory virus likely transmitted by a tourist, and Kalema-Zikusoka, a Ugandan wildlife veterinarian, knew that the coronavirus posed an even greater threat. “A lot of [tourists] are so excited to see [gorillas] that they won’t tell you that they’re sick,” she says.
As the pandemic spread around the world, Kalema-Zikusoka—who serves as executive director of Conservation Through Public Health, an organization dedicated to protecting mountain gorillas—instructed anyone who came close to the primates to wear masks. Ultimately, not one gorilla tested positive for COVID-19, and masks also reduced the interspecies transmission of influenza.
The 2020 pandemic was hardly the first time that Kalema-Zikusoka’s foresight has helped mountain gorillas, a subspecies of eastern gorilla native to Uganda, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Over three decades, the Rolex National Geographic Perpetual Planet Explorer has gained renown as a pioneer of One Health, an urgent but hard-to-implement conservation approach that aims to pair the protection of wildlife with the well-being of humans. Thanks partly to Kalema-Zikusoka’s efforts, mountain gorilla populations have nearly doubled since the 1990s. “You can’t look after the gorillas without improving the health of their human neighbors,” she says.
Kalema-Zikusoka, the youngest of six siblings and the daughter of prominent politicians, was an animal lover from youth. As a child growing up in Uganda, she adopted stray dogs and established a wildlife club. She eventually moved to London for veterinary school. In 1994 she visited Bwindi to conduct summer research on gorillas, creatures that had fascinated her since childhood. It would be a brief diversion, she thought, before embarking on a career treating domestic animals. Upon hiking into Bwindi’s interior, however, she entered a clearing and met a proud silverback named Kacupira. His warm, intelligent eyes found hers. “I felt a very deep connection,” she says.
Kacupira’s relatives were in dire trouble. Only 600 or so mountain gorillas then remained in Africa, around half in Bwindi. Poachers were thinning their ranks; loggers and farmers were lopping down their forest home. Meanwhile, ecotourists were trickling into the region, lured by Bwindi’s protection in 1991 and the habituation of some gorillas to humans. The new gorilla-trekking industry promised to bring much needed revenue, but it also threatened to expose the apes to novel health threats such as the flu. Kalema-Zikusoka decided her calling lay in caring for Kacupira’s kin, and in 1995 she persuaded the Ugandan government to hire her as the country’s first wildlife veterinarian.
Nine months later, crisis struck. A troop of gorillas began compulsively scratching themselves, and their skin turned white and scaly. When she tranquilized them, Kalema-Zikusoka discovered they had scabies, a mite-borne disease they’d likely contracted when they ventured into nearby banana fields and touched clothes that farmers had hung on scarecrows. Although she administered an antiparasitic drug, one juvenile perished.
In the tragedy’s aftermath, Kalema-Zikusoka met with locals to preach the importance of clothes washing and other hygienic practices. Just before she launched into her talking points, however, a ranger touched her hand. “Let’s hear what they have to say,” he suggested. Recommendations poured forth from villagers: more health education workshops, closer clinics. To help gorillas, Kalema-Zikusoka realized, she’d have to work with adjacent communities, not foist ideas upon them.
In 2003 Kalema-Zikusoka founded Conservation Through Public Health, a nonprofit based on Bwindi’s border, to promote the well-being of gorillas and people alike. From the get-go, it has monitored and treated gorillas, a process that entails retrieving scat, examining it for pathogens, and darting sick primates with medicine. But the organization has become equally focused on boosting human health and prosperity. Among other measures, it has installed handwashing stations, dewormed livestock, and dissuaded locals from eating wild game, for the sake of both conservation and disease prevention. The group has also doled out thousands of tree seedlings for firewood to discourage the community from gathering kindling from the rainforest, as well as seeds for crops like spinach and beans, furnishing food and income.
To observers, the organization’s success demonstrates the efficacy of One Health, the discipline that connects conservation to human welfare. The concept works in both directions. For instance, deforestation elsewhere in Africa has sparked Ebola outbreaks by forcing people into contact with virus-carrying bats. Yet One Health isn’t easy to practice, says Gary Tabor, an ecologist, veterinarian, and proponent of the initiative, insofar as it requires melding expertise in a broad array of fields, from conservation biology to epidemiology. “A lot of people talk about doing One Health,” Tabor says. “But Gladys is actually doing it.”
Her labors have paid off. Today Bwindi’s gorillas are less exposed to disease and haven’t suffered scabies since the early 2000s. More than a thousand mountain gorillas now roam Africa, making them the only great apes whose numbers are growing. Although many organizations deserve credit for the comeback, says Kalema-Zikusoka, “I really feel that we’ve helped.”
Having proved her organization’s worth, Kalema-Zikusoka has begun to expand its reach, training rangers to monitor gorillas and holding health workshops in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. She also hopes to broaden its purview near Bwindi, where gorilla numbers have grown but forest habitat hasn’t kept pace. Nearly 300 landowners have offered to sell their properties to the nonprofit if she can secure enough funding through grants and private donations. That so many people are willing to devote their land to conservation is, to Kalema-Zikusoka’s mind, a testament to how beloved gorillas have become, in no small part because their future is enmeshed with our own.
