In an unfortunate article published in Brazilian magazine Isto É this week, signed by journalist Raul Montenegro, a complaint that should put humans as victimizers convert them into victims and chimpanzees, in guilty.
The article is based on the abandonment of a group of chimpanzees in an ignored island in the African country of Liberia. After years of research and torture, they were under the control of the Blood Bank of New York (NYBC), being subjected to experiments with various human diseases, including many viruses of Hepatitis.
NYBC has been denounced worldwide for its cruelty when using these great apes, and now abandon them to their fate on an island that has no food resources for their survival.
The journalist, perhaps to justify human aggressors, falsely states that “chimpanzees are the main vector of several diseases that attack men.”
In fact the great predators of chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans in their wild habitat, via hunting, trafficking and death, are humans. Entire populations of great apes have been wiped out by diseases transmitted to a population that has no immunity to resist them. Among the diseases that the journalist poses as conveyed by great apes to humans, without showing any proof, are AIDS, ebola, ZIKA, yellow fever and monkeypox.
To support this false argument, he mentions statements of two microbiologists from UNIFESP, that I doubt about the support to this article.. Microbiologist Celso Granato is quoted saying this barbarity: “If anyone was contaminated with an animal like that and caught a plane to New York, it would be a catastrophe …”
The movement of human patients without control in the world is in fact the cause of the transmission of all these diseases, not the contact with the primates who desperately struggling to survive in an increasingly nonexistent day habitat.
Instead of fighting for the salvation of the unfortunate chimps abandoned to their luck on the island of Liberia, the article almost suggests their disposal to prevent the spread of diseases inoculated in them, which millions of human carriers and transmits daily to their peers.
In another of his preposterous conclusions, the journalist suggests that the zoo is a safe place to see the monkeys, but not in forests, where terrible diseases are incubated. He forgets to say that in zoos the primates are subjected to all kinds of contamination due to humans visiting them constantly and they end up dying prematurely; no one cares for this cruel practice and for the destination of species for which we must pay respect and ensure their existence.
Dr. Pedro A. Ynterian
General Secretary, GAP Project International