Good question – and I guess this depends on where the baboons live.
There are 5 different baboon species (although there is some arguement about this)… and they live all across the different countries in Africa! That’s a lot of different areas to cover.
So what the environment is like totally changes what diseases they might get.
If baboons eat wast from humans they can get TB – just like the badgers in the UK have!
They can also get hepatitus (caused by a virus), and a virus called herpes. You might have heard of both of these before as humans can get them too!
Some baboons can get SIV (which is similar to HIV)
… and these are just some of the examples of diseases they can get! Just like humans there are a range of diseases that infect them.
There are also parasites of the gut (which is where I come in…). Again there are many species that can infect baboons, but I’ll make a list of the ones that I look for…
So, wormy parasites:
Streptopharagus pigmentatus
Physaloptera caucasia
And sometimes we see other eggs too.. like Toxocara!
They have pretty complicated names, don’t you think?
So those are some of the diseases that I look at. Some baboons have many more types of parasites living inside them, but where my baboons live is a desert – and the dry environment makes it hard for the diseases to live, and spread!
If I won the money from this competition I would be able to make videos giving students ‘tours’ of inside the poo samples to see how I find diseases!
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