2020 will be remembered as the Pandemic Year, when a deadly pathogen somehow moved from bat to human—and the rest is history still being written. Six out of 10 infectious diseases are zoonotic: everything from COVID and the other coronaviruses to rabies, West Nile, even the plague. In a Croesus-like effort to break the cycle, Denmark recently killed 17 million farmed mink to try to prevent further human infection—but that seems immoral as well as stupid.

Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka has a better idea. Dr Gladys, as she is known, believes that zoonotic disease is controllable by simultaneously working to improve the health of humans and animals, at the points where they meet. Her work, primarily with the mountain gorillas of Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, has contributed not only to resurgence in the gorilla population, but also to an improvement in the health and welfare of the human communities that live around the Park.

She explains her approach in this episode of New Thinking for a New World.

Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka is a winner of the 2022 Tällberg-SNF-Eliasson Globbal Leadership Prize.

This episode was originally published on December 17, 2020