快猫短视频

FEARS are growing that ecotourism and ecological research could be harming wildlife by spreading human diseases to animals.

Researchers strongly suspect that three outbreaks of tuberculosis among mongooses and meerkats in Botswana started in humans. And they say the problem will only get worse unless careful controls are put in place.

Ecotourism provides much of the money needed for wildlife conservation in Africa. Botswana鈥檚 second-largest national park, Chobe, where two of the outbreaks happened, pulls in $1.5 million dollars a year in park fees alone. But some fear that too many visitors will destroy the 鈥渦nspoilt鈥� habitat they come to see.

The threat from human infections is certainly real enough. New intestinal parasites have already been found in the faeces of mountain gorillas in East Africa since tourists began arriving in large numbers (快猫短视频, 27 January 2001, p 18). Now a team of researchers led by Kathleen Alexander, Botswana鈥檚 Senior Wildlife Veterinary Officer, has documented the first clear-cut case of a primarily human pathogen being passed to wildlife. They have discovered two outbreaks of TB in banded mongooses at Chobe, and one which wiped out a group of meerkats in the Kalahari Desert.

At Chobe, the mongooses are thought to have caught the disease from rubbish heaps outside a tourist lodge that were contaminated with the human pathogen. It is less clear how the meerkats became infected.

But whatever the transfer mechanism, the disease ultimately came from local people as there are no animals in the area known to naturally carry human TB. Alexander thinks that the AIDS epidemic that now afflicts more than a third of Botswana鈥檚 population is part of the problem. People who have both AIDS and TB are much more likely to infect wildlife because they shed higher levels of the bacterium in spit or faeces.

She thinks that ecotourism should be designed to minimise contact between animals and people. 鈥淲e need to be addressing the threat that humans pose to wildlife,鈥� she says.