Cooked monkey may look unappetizing to Westerners, but when high-protein food is scarce, poaching is profitable.
Simple proximity is a critical factor.
The more intimate you are with a pathogen, the more likely it is to take up residence in your body. So it should not be surprising that hunting and butchering of wild animals were major risks in a recent study of disease emergence. Study author Nathan Wolfe, a biologist with the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, wrote us from the field in Cameroon to explain that the links between hunting and Ebola transmission were not experimentally proven, but were based on surveys showing that the more you hunted, the more likely you were to contract the deadly bleeding disease. Hunting chimpanzees, in fact, were more likely to be infected than chimpanzees with other well-known risk factors, such as direct physical contact with individuals who had died from Ebola. As our closest living relatives, the apes, and to a slightly lesser extent the other nonhuman primates, are susceptible to many of the same infectious diseases as humans.