Over the past few weeks, I’ve made no secret about my growing
love for medical anthropology. I’ve been dying to try and make a
connection between primatology and medical anthropology, but for
weeks, I haven’t been able to think of anything–that is, until
now. Peter Walsh, a primatologist affiliated with the Max Planck
Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, has set up an
initiative to establish a working vaccine for ebola to protect
populations of African great apes from the viral disease. Ebola
is responsible for killing one-third of the gorilla population
and a sizable amount of chimpanzees in the last twenty years
(Walsh et al. 2007). With that in mind, creating a working
vaccine seems like a worthwhile solution: prevent these
(critically, in some cases) endangered primates from losing
group members by creating a vaccine that is responsible for
killing up to a third of the population. Or does it? I have some
reservations, but I’ll get into that a little while. Ebola:
Nightmares are made of this As stated