Wearing face masks and maintaining social distances were a significant part of the world's reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, new research says the practices are not only effective at saving human lives, but chimp lives as well.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic ravaged the world in 2019 and 2020, study after study has shown that one of the more effective strategies to combat the spread of the disease was the wearing of face masks. In 2021 in fact, a global study published in the British Medical Journal showed that the practice cut the incidence of the disease by an average of 53%. That same study showed that adequate handwashing was equally effective at slowing disease transmission and that social distancing led to a 25% lower transmission rate on average.
While it's now commonly known that these strategies work well to keep humans safe, a new study has looked at whether the practices can keep our chimp cousins healthy as well.
In 2016, at the Ngogo Chimpanzee Project in Uganda's Kibale National Park (a site featured in the 2023 Netflix documentary, Chimp Empire), a virus jumped from humans to the chimp population. The disease spread through the group eventually claiming the lives of 25 of the almost 200 members who lived there, which represented the largest chimp population ever observed in the wild.
After tamping down that outbreak by February 2017, the researchers working at Ngogo implemented a new series of protocols. While they already were staying about 15 ft (4.5 m) away from the chimps and either burying their waste or avoiding leaving it in the forest at all, the new protocols resemble what the world would begin to adopt in 2019 to combat COVID.
If a researcher had any symptoms of an infection, they were quarantined from the forest until they felt better. The distance they were required to keep from the chimps expanded to 20 ft (6 m), with an even more safety-focused 30 ft (9 m) recommended. They also now needed to don face masks and sanitize their hands when around the chimps. Finally, they had to wear different clothing when entering the forest than the normal clothes they wore at camp.
For the new study, lead author Jacob Negrey examined about 70 samples of chimp excrement collected between 2015 to 2019 to analyze what was going on in the population before, during, and after the outbreak. Negrey is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Arizona's College of Social and Behavioral Sciences. He is also the co-director at Ngogo.
Negrey used lab analysis to identify which DNA in the waste came from viruses spread by humans. He found both a reduction in viral shedding among the chimp population after the new protocols were enacted as well as a reduction of the chimps' coughing rates, which fell from 1.73% of the time to 0.356%.
"We're really excited about this study because it actually does show – for the first time, as far as I'm aware – that these protocols work," Negrey said, referring to how the protocols reduced human-to-chimp disease transmission.
In follow-up observations, after the camp implemented quarantine procedures for anyone coming to visit from the outside from 2020 forward, the coughing rate plummeted to 0.075%.
Negrey says the findings could have implications for wildlife tourism in addition to its impact on keeping chimps safe in research environments.
"They're so special, they're so weird, and they're really unlike anything else on Earth," he said about the chimps. "It's to our great benefit to protect them for future generations so we can continue to be awed by them and continue to learn from them."
The study has been published in the journal Biological Conservation.
Source: The University of Arizona
