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Scientists said Thursday they have developed a
vaccine to shield endangered chimpanzees and gorillas against Ebola, which has
wiped out tens of thousands of the wild apes in three decades.
The vaccine is given orally, the developers said,
which means it could be disguised in food and left out for the animals to eat –
easier and less traumatic than darting.
“Our closest relatives are being driven rapidly
towards extinction by diseases like Ebola, by commercial bushmeat hunting and
by habitat loss, and for a lot of this we are responsible,” said Peter Walsh of
the University of Cambridge, who took part in the research.
“We now have this technology that can help save
them, and there is a moral obligation that we should do it,” he told AFP.
In laboratory tests with ten chimpanzees, the
vaccine – dubbed filorab1 – was shown to be safe and to generate “a robust
immune response” to the Ebola virus, researchers reported in the journal
Scientific Reports.
Walsh is now developing a system for putting the
vaccine into bait that apes will eat in the wild. Only then can the vaccine be
rolled out, to gorillas first and chimps later.
Ebola was first identified in what was then Zaire
– now the Democratic Republic of Congo – in 1976.
