Hey Anna! I also enjoyed reading the chapter Thirteen Gorillas. I found it scary that while Kelly Warfield was experimenting with the mice, her life was completely changed in an instant. This is terrifying because people do this every day for a living. So many people do stuff like this for a living. They experiment and test different infectious diseases in different animals eventually finding new cures or new information about the diseases being worked with. Without these people, we would not have the cures for diseases like we do today.
I also find it very interesting that we are the cause of a lot of these epidemics. I never thought that us encroaching on animals' territory is the reason why a lot of these diseases are out and among us. The New York Times states that "Diseases have always come out of the woods and wildlife and found their way into human populations — the plague and malaria are two examples. But emerging diseases have quadrupled in the last half-century, experts say, largely because of increasing human encroachment into habitats, especially in disease “hot spots” around the globe, mostly in tropical regions" (New York Times). Two major infectious diseases that impacted our world (Malaria and Plague) were all caused because of us disrupting animals' habitats. If we had not disrupted the animals' habitats, these infectious diseases might never have been released. Overall, both of these ideas have changed the way I will think.
Robbins, Jim. “The Ecology of Disease.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 14 July 2012, www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/sunday-review/the-ecology-of-disease.html.