Great Ape Health in Tropical Africa: Emerging diseases, conservation and evolutionary perspectives on human health (GATECEP)

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Zoonotic pathogens pose a serious threat to global human health. The COVID-19 pandemic highlights the devastating impact the spill-over of a novel pathogen from an animal reservoir into the human population can have. Surveillance systems allowing for the early detection of pathogen circulation in wildlife are urgently needed to allow rapid responses from local and global public health systems. Due to a high degree of biodiversity and rapid ecological changes, Sub-Saharan Africa has been pinpointed as a major source of novel pathogens. Our innovative approach has proven successful; it makes use of a natural experiment – using our closest living relatives, the wild great apes, living in high biodiversity areas as sentinels for relevant pathogens. Through research and tourism projects great apes are habituated to humans and can be more easily studied. In the first funding period of the GATECEP project we established such sentinel surveillance programs at six sites in four countries (Côte d’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Central African Republic, and Gabon), and collected and published data on a number of zoonotic diseases, including monkeypox, anthrax, yaws, and leprosy. We also gathered data on pathogens threatening the survival of endangered species and contributed to protecting these great ape populations from the COVID-19 pandemic. We provided intensive training to local PhD students in safe sample collection, recording of behavioural data, and a suite of laboratory approaches. We set up field laboratories for rapid on-site diagnostics and improved capacities at national laboratories. In the proposed prolongation, we will continue surveillance for novel diseases through our approach and follow up on clusters of unique symptoms for which no infectious agent has yet been identified. We will investigate the ecology of the most important pathogens identified by using further field techniques and molecular tools that allow for an exploration of pathogen sources (e.g. through great ape predation of animals or environmental exposure) and a more detailed understanding of disease transmission dynamics in our closest living relatives. Our investigations will challenge classic hypotheses regarding the origins of some major human pathogens and shed light on the role of the environment as a source for these pathogens. Through the inclusion of three satellite sites in Guinea Bissau and the Republic of Congo, where symptoms of these key pathogens were also observed, as well as broader training of people working in other protected areas in the partner countries, we will be able to test for geographic patterns in pathogen phylogenies and detect between-species transmission events that would otherwise remain obscured in sparse phylogenies. This prolongation includes further opportunities to strengthen the scientific careers of local scientists while transferring skills and resources for surveillance activities at local institutions.