INTRODUCTION

Primatologists capture wild primates for many reasons, including medical screening (Chapter 1), sampling for endocrinology, genetics (Chapter 21) and physiology (Chapter 19), or for marking and radiotelemetry (Chapter 10). Since capture and handling is always accompanied by the risk of injury or mortality, it is ethically important to maximize the information gathered during these procedures (Karesh et al., 1998). You should therefore collect biological samples every time wild primates are handled. New techniques are also emerging where biological and disease data can be obtained remotely (Jensen et al., 2009; Leendertz et al., 2004) and we encourage researchers to obtain data by using the least invasive methods available.

Infectious agents affect population dynamics, ecology, behaviour and reproductive success, and disease and health issues are thus widely recognized as important factors in wildlife conservation (Daszak et al., 2000; Deem et al., 2001). Primates deserve special attention for general health issues because of the potential for disease exchange between non-human primates and humans (zoonoses) (Chapter 1). The health status and diseases of free-living primates, the inter-relationships between diseases of wild primates and other biological parameters, and more generally the baseline biological parameters of primates under natural conditions, are rapidly growing areas of research. Moreover, emerging infectious diseases are a cause for concern in primates (Chapter 1; Leendertz et al., 2006) and primate researchers themselves have also been the origin of disease in wild primates (Kondgen et al., 2008).