Monkey medicine

Beth Gavrilles, [email protected]

Contact: Ria Ghai, [email protected]

Scientific American recently covered research by Odum School postdoctoral associate Ria Ghai. She and her colleagues studied a colony of red colobus monkeys in Kibale National Park in Uganda for four years. They found that monkeys infected with whipworms appear to self-medicate, significantly increasing their intake of certain plants used in local traditional medicine.

The findings were published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B in September.

Read the Scientific American story by Jason G. Goldman: Self-Medicating Monkeys Gobble Painkilling Bark Read the paper: Sickness behavior associated with non-lethal infections in wild primates