Investigate Chimpanzee Medicine

Investigating the current state of chimpanzee medicine

Introduction

The Kenneth A. Scott Charitable Trust funding has enabled us to establish a database for captive chimpanzee medical and health information, to be accessible through the Internet. Currently chimpanzee behavioral data is available to ChimpanZoo website users worldwide. The addition of medical information, online, will allow caretakers and researchers to compare and contrast the behavior of chimpanzees before and after reported illnesses.

The goal of our inquiry into the current state of chimpanzee medicine is to extend the reach of chimpanzee healthcare and increase the international use of chimpanzee medical information and treatment. Through the efforts of our program coordinators and affiliate veterinarians, we will be collecting valuable field data about chimpanzee illnesses and subsequent treatments for the purpose of freely extending this core knowledge internationally to students, researchers, veterinarians, and zoo keepers to help bring about a shared understanding of nonhuman primate medicine.

Objectives

1. Bring together and freely extend chimpanzee medical information
2. Baseline statistical data on illness occurrance for research and diagnosis purposes

Methodology

From the outset it was determined that several resources are required to conduct an adequate healthcare survey. These resources include: (1) coordinated affiliate veterinarians; (2) adequate and relevant illness data collection; (3) integrated Internet data submission; (4) compatible organization of data to the current ISIS standards for data integration; and (5) computer facilities to analyze the data.

Extending medical information to an international level and increasing the levels of care offerred to chimpanzees and other nonhuman primates requires a group of coordinated affiliate veterinarians. By offering affiliation status to our volunteer veterinarians as well as recognition on our website, we anticipate capturing a qualified group of medical practitioners.

Adequate and relevant illness data collection is a very important element in increasing the healthcare and welfare of chimpanzees internationally. Through the identification of illnesses, infections, and infestations, we have built a structure for data collection that allows ChimpanZoo to offer both depth and breath in medical data and diagnosis.

Lowering costs generally associated with data collection, we have developed a means to collect data direct from medical practitioners through the use of the Internet. This approach increases efficiency by directly inputting data into our database for immediate retrieval for researchers and the international community at large.

The incorporation of historic medical data is paramount to building depth in data in order to offer the global community research statistics, diagnosis trends, and rare disease occurrence and treatments. Aligning ourselves with the ISIS data format, we can incorporate standardized data immediately.

A supporting infrastructure is necessary to properly provide to our audiences including retrieving and providing data over the Internet, the protection of valuable data that is collected, and to allow for the computational analysis of findings.