By Helen Briggs BBC News
25 March 2020
Conservation experts are calling for urgent action to protect our closest living relatives, the great apes, from the threat of coronavirus.
New measures are needed to reduce the risk of wild gorillas, chimps and orangutans encountering the virus, scientists warn in a letter in Nature.
Habitat loss and poaching are big threats to the survival of great apes, but viruses are also a concern.
Scientists say the current outbreak warrants the utmost caution.
Infectious disease is now listed among the top three threats to some great ape groups.
"We do not know what the effect of the virus on them is and that means we have to take the precautionary principle and reduce the risk that they will get the virus," said Prof Serge Wich of Liverpool John Moores University, UK, who is a co-signatory of the letter.
"That means halting tourism, which is happening in several countries already, reducing research, being very cautious with reintroduction programmes, but also potentially halting infrastructure and extractive projects in great ape habitats which bring people in closer contact with great apes and thus potentially spread this virus to them."
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