Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka on Public Health in the Developing World

Below, Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka responds to the question:

The boundaries of science are continually expanding as scientists become increasingly integral to finding solutions for larger social issues, such as poverty, conflict, financial crises, etc. On what specific issue/problem do you feel we need to bring the scientific lens to bear?

I think that we need to bring the scientific lens to bear on the larger social issue of the role that public health and sustainable environments play in reducing poverty, and in some situations, conflict in war torn areas. In developing countries and particularly in Africa, public health is one of the biggest indicators of poverty. At the same time, ecotourism is a product that has some of the greatest potential to create national wealth. In the face of conflict, ecotourism cannot develop. When protected area communities are poor it is very difficult to get them to become true stewards of the wildlife that they share a habitat with, which in turn undermines the potential for sustainable ecotourism. It becomes a vicious cycle because they need sustainable ecotourism to have sustainable livelihoods to be able to break the poverty cycle. Furthermore, sustainable ecotourism is dependent on having healthy wildlife populations, particularly in the case of great ape tourism because of the greater than 98 percent genetic relatedness with people, public health plays an even more important role in maintaining health ecosystems and environments.

An example is Bwindi Impenetrable National park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Uganda, which before mountain gorillas were habituated for tourism, was one of the poorest corners of Africa, where people earned a living by working at a tea factory and selling local brew. Once tourism began the mud huts selling local brew became flourishing trading centres, where people come from all over the world to track the critically endangered mountain gorillas, estimated at 760 individuals in the wild, half of which are in Bwindi. Furthermore, on top of creating jobs in the Uganda Wildlife Authority, some of the tourism revenue is used to build schools, clinics, and roads. However, because people and gorillas share 98.4% DNA genetic material the potential for cross-species disease transmission is very great. This resulted in a fatal disease outbreak of scabies skin disease, in two of the gorilla groups, with death of an infant and sickness in the rest of the gorilla groups that only recovered with veterinary interventions of Ivermectin treatment. The scabies were eventually traced to a related host, the human communities living around the park who have very little modern health care, inadequate hygiene practices, and information on diseases that can be transmitted between animals and people. The gorillas came into contact with scabies mite infested clothing, which then spread through the group. If the whole gorilla group had died, Uganda Wildlife Authority would have lost over one million dollars of revenue per year.