"Bubbles" for Baboons

Among my many medical failings, foremost among them has always been this - I can't NOT pick at things.  As a child, pretty much every loose tooth I worried out on my own as soon as I felt the slightest wobble.  I had a scab on my knee throughout all of middle school because I kept reopening it  I trim my nails down until they are essentially nonexistent.  Give me a slight piece of peeling skin from sunburn, and soon I'll have the entire thing off, shedding like a snake.  When something on my body isn't quite right, I can't leave it alone.

So imagine my delight at leaving the doctor's office one day with a marble-sized bubble under my skin - on the underside of my forearm, where I couldn't help but play with it - and being told to leave it alone for two days.

That little bubble, first appearing when I was thirteen years old. was the preamble to my career with primates.

The bubble, you see, was obtained as part of a test to determine if I had tuberculosis, which I previously had only thought of as the killer of sensitive heroines from my mom's Victorian-era romance novels.  It just so happens that Tb is of equal concern to zookeepers and vets, especially for employees working with non-human primates.  Passing this test and demonstrating myself to be Tb-free was a prerequisite for being allowed to work with monkeys and lemurs.

Much of the appeal surrounding apes and other primates is how similar to humans they are, both in physical appearance and in behavior.  Part of that similarity extends to health and immunity - diseases that impact humans can also impact other primates, to a greater degree than you would see with other animals.  I've never worried about giving my dog a cold, or catching one from her.  Zookeepers who have colds or other diseases, however, are often barred from working with primates (by this point, I'm just going to say "primates" and assume that we all understand that we're referring to "non-human" primates).  Keepers working with them require extra health screening.  Visitors on behind-the-scenes tours may be allowed to get up close and personal with big cats, bears, rhinos, or elephants - but seldom gorillas or chimps.  Generally, the closer the species is to humans, in terms of evolution, the greater the risk there is of disease transmission.

It's not surprising that so many monkeys and apes, especially new borns, died in early zoos.  Keepers pulled the infants from their mothers, thinking that they'd be safer in a nursery under human care... and with all those human germs.

It works both ways, of course.  People can get diseases from primates.  There is a lot of evidence that many of the most frightening human illnesses, such as HIV and Ebola, are cross-overs from apes in Africa, possibly making the switch when humans butchered carcasses of those animals for the bushmeat trade.  There have been cases of keepers catching SIV (similar to HIV) and Herpes from Old World monkeys, such as macaques and baboons.  Given the fondness for many primates for "sharing" their feces, urine, and semen with caretakers, it's not hard to see how diseases can be spread.

Two days later, I went back to the doctor.  The skin on my forearm was flat, with no evidence that the bubble was ever there.  With that test passed and that obstacle cleared, I was given a note to bring to the zoo volunteer office.  I was now set to be a primate keeper.