 Infectious disease has played a major role in human history and evolution, and a wide diversity of parasites and pathogens continue to impact human health around the globe. Infectious disease also plays a major role in the lives of nonhuman primates, with Ebola hemorrhagic fever and other diseases causing population declines in wild primates, and high levels of infection with a variety of other sub-lethal pathogens likely to have negative impacts on primate population growth.
Research on infectious disease in the Department of Primatology is based on the view that pathogens represent a major selective force in wild primates, and that understanding the role of disease in primate socioecology provides fundamental insights to human evolution, primate evolutionary ecology and primate conservation.
To examine the factors that influence disease risk in primates, we combine field, laboratory and modeling approaches, and we synthesize research from diverse fields involving animal behavior, disease ecology, virology, parasitology and phylogenetics.
Current topics of interest include:
- modeling the spatial spread of Ebola and other infectious diseases in African apes
- sampling wild primates for parasites, particularly through non-invasive methods, and documenting new viral strains and causes of mortality
- analyses of parasite richness and prevalence across primate species
- use of medicinal plants
- identifying sources of infection that threaten great apes
- geographic analyses of parasitism at regional and global scales
- application of 'ecological informatics' to build databases on parasites in wild primates (www.mammalparasites.org)
Our research on infectious disease dovetails with interests in cultural evolution, with models used to study disease spread also providing a platform for investigating the spread of cultural traits.
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