PARENT SESSION
Contributed Oral Session 167: Toxicology / Disease: Viruses, Fungi, and Contaminants
Friday, August 12, 8:00 AM - 11:30 AM, Meeting Room 524 A, Level 5, Palais des congrès de Montréal

Predicting future Ebola impact on African apes.

Walsh, Peter^*,1, ¹ Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Primatology, Leipzig, Germany

ABSTRACT- Over the last decade the Zaire strain of Ebola virus has gradually spread across the central African countries of Gabon and Republic of Congo, killing roughly one third of the world western gorilla population and a large number of common chimpanzees. In order to estimate the rate of Ebola spread I used maximum likelihood methods to fit the parameters of a grid based SIR model to ape survey data and data on the distribution of human outbreaks and ape mortalities. I then used the fitted model to project future patterns of spread. The results suggest that Ebola may reach most of the remaining viable populations of apes within the next 3-5 years. I also used the model to test for both a channeling effect of rivers on the pattern of Ebola spread and density dependence in the rate of ape mortality. I will discuss the results of these analyses and their implications for the efforts to mitigate Ebola impact on apes.

Key words: Gorilla gorilla, Ebola, Emergent disease, SIR