Talking EcoHealth and unexpected chimpanzees with Dr. Anne Laudisoit

The PrimateCast

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Our guest in this installment of The PrimateCast and Conservation Voices is Dr. Anne Laudisoit, senior scientist at EcoHealth Alliance in New York City, who visited us at the Primate Research Institute last month between two field trips in eastern DRCongo.
Plague, monkeypox and more
In the podcast, Dr. Laudisoit starts by coming back to her disease biology background and how her fascination with zoonotic diseases started… trapping rats in Kinshasa as a master’s student!
She then goes into more detail about the One Health approach through some zoonotic diseases she has been studying from a fieldwork point of view, such as plague in Tanzania, monkeypox in DRC, as well as their intermediate, accidental (-often us) and ultimate hosts!
From field experience to field experience, we can hear Anne’s passion for her work, the biodiversity she encounters, and the projects of which she is a part, such as EcoHealth Alliance’s PREDICT project, which aims to predict future viral epidemics globally.
A newly discovered population of chimpanzees
In the second part of the interview, Anne shares the other side of her fieldwork: Primatology!
In 2015, while sampling for pathogens and meeting with locals in the Blue Mountains Region, in the northeast of the DRCongo, Anne and colleagues find a chimpanzee community living along this high-altitude fragmented landscape.
Two years later, she comes back with a team of Congolese researchers from the University of Kisangani (UNIKIS) and the Biodiversity Monitoring Center (CSB), as well as a photojournalist friend, Caroline Thirion, to explore the region and make a film called MBUDHA about their expedition and the incredible biodiversity they encounter… including chimpanzees that live near a stream called Mbudha ("water of chimpanzees" in the Kibale language).
Photo Credit: Heungjin Ryu

The PrimateCast is hosted and produced by Andrew MacIntosh. Artwork by Chris Martin. Music by Andre Goncalves.
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