Ecosystem Health
As humans progress ever further into the forest, the risk of disease transmission between humans and wildlife becomes greater. Many diseases can move back and forth between species, mutating into more virulent, resistant forms. The AIDs virus may be such a case, as it is thought that it entered human populations through the consumption of non-human primates. Over 60 percent of the 1,415 infectious diseases currently known to modern medicine are capable of infecting both humans and animals. Most of these diseases originated in animals and now infect people.
In Congo the communities that rely on wildlife for their protein are vulnerable to pathogens from the forest. Subsistence hunters sometimes take advantage of animal carcasses for food, potentially infecting themselves and their families with disease diseases in the process.
Livestock movement can introduce diseases also. Tuberculosis—a disease afflicting domesticated cattle and humans—has now spread across continents, infecting wild bison in Canada, deer in Michigan, and Cape buffalo in South Africa.