Amina, a 6-year-old female chimpanzee, was infected with a virus that may have killed her mother during a 2017 outbreak at Ngogo in Kibale National Forest in Uganda.
By Ann GibbonsScience’s COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Pulitzer Center.Seven years ago, a respiratory virus swept through the 56 chimpanzees in the Kanyawara community at Kibale National Park in Uganda, where researchers have studied chimp behavior and society for 33 years.
More than 40 apes were sickened; five died. “Chimpanzees looked like limp dolls on the forest floor,” coughing and sneezing and absolutely miserable, recalls disease ecologist Tony Goldberg of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “It was just horrendous.”The culprit?