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Brent Stirton

To keep the ivory from the black market, a ranger hacks the tusks off a poached elephant in Kenya’s Amboseli National Park in an image published in October 2012.

Elephants drink from a lake near Galgamuwa, in northwestern Sri Lanka. With much of the country’s land developed, its estimated 6,000 elephants are forced to share almost 70 percent of their habitat with humans.

Henriete Bakete Wanda, 13, sits in a hospital isolation room where she’s receiving antibiotic treatment for a monkeypox infection after her mother quickly recognized the symptoms and sought help. One in 10 people infected with the virulent Clade I monkeypox strain die from the disease.

The town of Oesso, on the banks of the Sangha River in the Republic of Congo, is a major hub for the wild meat trade. Animals and other goods are transported by wooden dugouts, automobiles, and motorbikes. Local sellers offer the meat for half the price it can fetch in big cities, where a disease outbreak could rapidly spread, infecting millions.

Arthur Bengo, 28, became infected with monkeypox after eating a sick monkey he’d shot to feed his family in northern Democratic Republic of Congo. As his fever soared, he developed the telltale painful lesions that left scars on his face and body. The Africa Centers for Disease Control reports upwards of 3,500 monkeypox cases in the DRC, including more than 120 deaths this year.

The Sangha River is a popular trade route for goods and wild game such as monkeys, rodents, and deer hunted and sold in village markets in the Republic of Congo and neighboring Cameroon. Some researchers say the key to reducing the risk of infectious diseases “spilling over” from wildlife to people is protecting forests from human encroachment.

After losing one daughter to monkeypox, 18-year-old Blandine Bosaku, who is pregnant, received antibiotic treatment at a rural health clinic in northern Democratic Republic of Congo. When a pregnant woman becomes sick with monkeypox, the disease can transmit to her fetus, shrinking the baby’s chance of survival. Health experts are calling for increased disease surveillance in such remote parts of Africa to better detect the first signs of an outbreak.

“You will be missed.” These are the words photographer Brent Stirton had for Ndakasi, an orphaned mountain gorilla, after her death in 2021. “If I could speak to her, I would say it was one of the saddest moments I’ve had in my career to witness your passing,” says Stirton, who won the Photojournalism category.

Masked to protect his identity, an undercover officer displays the exoskeleton of a pangolin, Ivory Coast. While trophy hunting tends to involve larger animals whose hides, heads, bones or horns are mounted for display, it is unclear to what extent the law will impact non-trophy endangered animal parts, such as this pangolin exoskeleton, which are illegal to import for commercial uses under CITES rules.

A story in the September 2016 issue documented the scientific advances that may mean an end to blindness. In this photo, sisters in India marvel at new sights after donors paid for surgery to correct their cataracts.