Wildlife Health Talks

This episode takes us to Bangladesh, a first for the podcast, where Dr. Sabrina Ferdous is doing wildlife health research in one of the most unusual field sites you'll ever hear about: a centuries-old religious shrine, home to a critically endangered turtle found almost nowhere else on earth.
The shrine pond is visited by thousands of devotees who consider both the turtles and their water sacred. But when Sabrina and her team started investigating a troubling decline in eggs and hatchlings, they found a cocktail of zoonotic bacteria in that same water people were taking home to drink. The public health implications are hard to ignore.
Sabrina also gives us a candid look at what it means to be a pioneering female wildlife veterinarian in a male-dominated field in Bangladesh, and shares a story from a research trip that nearly ended her career before it began. Spoiler: she was back in the field within two months.
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Every day at Project Wildlife in San Diego, Briana Eisan sees the consequences of a scroll: baby raccoons scooped up by well-meaning strangers, people reaching bare-handed toward bats, wildlife encounters going viral for all the wrong reasons. As a veterinary assistant at one of the largest wildlife rehabilitation programs in the US, she's on the front lines of both disease surveillance and an quieter epidemic: the spread of wildlife misinformation online.
In this episode, Briana explores how social media shapes public behavior toward wildlife and what that means for disease transmission, animal welfare, and conservation. From naturalized Amazon parrot flocks over San Diego to the psychology behind why people anthropomorphize wild animals, she makes the case that the same platforms driving dangerous encounters can, in the right hands, become powerful tools for change.
Links
Learn more about the Project Wildlife of the San Diego Humane Society
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Northern Kenya is one of Africa's most biodiverse landscapes, and one of its most demanding places to be a wildlife vet. Dr. Sharon Mulindi, senior veterinary officer at Kenya Wildlife Service, covers a vast stretch of this arid, wildlife-rich region where a 24/7 on-call schedule is less a job requirement and more a way of life. From darting wounded lions before breakfast to treating elephant calves in the midday heat, her days rarely go as planned.
In this episode, Sharon shares the detective story behind a troubling spike in elephant deaths on the slopes of Mount Kenya, where an invasive plant quietly transformed a lush forest into a nutritional trap, and reflects on the growing pressures of climate change on Northern Kenya's wildlife and communities. She also discusses her research interests in zoonotic disease and antimicrobial resistance, and what it means to build a career as one of very few female wildlife vets in the region.
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What happens when a wildlife vet who spent years nursing slow lorises back to health walks into a live animal market, not to rescue animals, but to sit down with the vendors selling them?
That's exactly what Dr. Wendi Prameswari does. Based in Indonesia with conservation NGO YIARI, Wendi works across two of the country's most pressing wildlife-human interfaces: the live animal markets of West Java, and the forest communities of West Kalimantan where hunting wildlife is woven into daily life. Her approach isn't to shut anything down, it's to build trust, one conversation at a time.
In this episode, Wendi shares what it takes to gain the confidence of traders who have every reason to be suspicious, why talking about COVID's economic impact opens doors that talking about viruses never could, and how a local tribe's ancient village-closing ritual turned out to be a remarkably effective form of quarantine.
Links
Learn more about Yayasan Inisiasi Alam Rehabilitasi Indonesia (YIARI), the nonprofit organization Wendi is working for here.
Read the story of 10 years of YIARI's work in slow loris conservation here.
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Dr. Justorien Rambeloniaina grew up in northeastern Madagascar watching lemurs captured and killed, not yet knowing they were among the world's most endangered primates. Today he's fighting for them on every front, reconnecting fragmented forests with a five-kilometre wildlife corridor, combating the illegal pet trade, and sharing a quietly powerful encounter with a family keeping two mouse lemurs in a yellow water container, and what happened next.
But his approach goes beyond the animals themselves. By establishing healthcare and education centres in remote villages, his team tackles the deeper drivers of habitat loss, because when communities thrive, lemurs have a fighting chance too. This is One Health conservation at its most grounded: built on community trust, shaped by personal experience, and driven by the conviction that Malagasy people are best placed to protect Madagascar's natural heritage.
Links
Learn more: 
The Dr. Abigail Ross Foundation for Applied Conservation (TDARFAC)
The Lemur Freedom Project
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