Monthly Report
January 2021
Foreword
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY | PROJECT MANAGER Good Bye, Akiba Dear Friends and Supporters,
The year 2021 started with the deepest sorrow, and it is with a lot of pain that I am writing this foreword. For more than a month, our sweet Akiba, a female Western Lowland gorilla beloved in our community as a gentle and lovable soul, had been fighting for her life. Despite immense efforts to understand and treat her condition, our vet team were unable to save her. Akiba sadly passed away on the 1st of February, a date that will remain in our minds and hearts forever. I wish to thank the community of veterinarians who provided advice and great support.
Without them, we would not have been able to get her as far as she could before she could go on no longer. Despite limited veterinary capacities and equipment to perform thorough diagnoses, we successfully performed our first ever blood transfusion from the daughter Atimbi to her mother (same group was confirmed). We had hoped that Akiba would recover after this procedure. We pursued our efforts to understand the cause of sickness with several microbiological, biochemistry and hematological analyses. But as with humans, gorillas cannot fight forever. A few days after the procedure, she passed away (p.11-14). Akiba has had a long history of health issues in the past, but in the past 5 years, she had been very stable, active, playful and feeding very well. In mid-December, she started to show
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