We are excited to announce the launch of a new five-year research project led by the Uganda Virus Research Institute in partnership with an international consortium that includes our Gorilla Doctors team. Using our One Health approach, this project, generously funded by the Wellcome Trust, will investigate dengue and Zika viruses to help us better understand diseases that affect gorillas, people, and wildlife living in a shared environment.

What Are Dengue and Zika Viruses?

Dengue and Zika viruses are spread by mosquitoes in the Aedes family. These are the same pesky insects that can bother both humans and in theory gorillas (we aim to find out about gorillas!). The mosquitoes can be found all over the world, and are expanding their range to new areas due to a warming climate.

Keeping People and Gorillas Healthy

Zika was first discovered in Uganda in 1947 in a rhesus macaque and a mosquito. Researchers were actually looking for an entirely different virus and accidentally found Zika virus instead. Surprisingly, despite the virus being around for a long time, we don’t have a lot of information on how it affects people or gorillas in Uganda. 

This new project will help address this knowledge gap by:

1. Analyzing samples previously collected from people, gorillas and other non-human primates for the presence of both Zika and dengue viruses to investigate their potential circulation in both humans and primates.
2. Comparing the immune response of people in Uganda with people in other parts of the world, again, using previously collected data from our international collaborators. By looking back at this kind of information, we can learn how a person’s past history with one of these viruses might make them more or less likely to get sick from a new infection.

In the below video, Dr. Nelson, a Gorilla Doctors field veterinarian in Uganda, collects samples from wild baboons to test for viruses. Dr. Nelson will be pursuing a PhD in this new project to better understand dengue and Zika virus patterns in wild primates in collaboration with the University of California Berkeley and Makerere University in Uganda:

To prevent future outbreaks from these viruses, it is crucial to understand them better – both how they circulate in the environment as well as how one virus might affect the other with respect to how they make both people and gorillas sick.

Over the next five years of this project, our team will explore how these viruses spread in the wild as well as what impact they have on people’s health in local communities. Learning more about these emerging threats is critical for safeguarding gorilla populations, especially as mosquitoes expand to new geographic regions and at higher elevations where gorillas live.

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Join our Team!

We’re looking for a passionate new researcher to join our team at UC Berkeley and UVRI as a postdoctoral fellow to help us with this exciting project. If you have a passion for wildlife conservation, human health, scientific research, and a background in epidemiology or biostatistics and modeling, we encourage you to apply and help us protect both people and gorillas! For more information on specifics and how to apply, please email: smileylab@berkeley.edu

About the Wellcome Trust

The Wellcome Trust is a global charitable foundation that wants everyone to benefit from science’s potential to improve health and save lives. Learn more at: wellcome.org

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