Animal to man, fear of the next pandemic

On a frigid night a few days after Christmas 2012, Trish Khan drove back to the Milwaukee County Zoo to check on the star attraction, a playful, wildly popular 5-year-old orangutan named Mahal. It was almost 11 p.m.

Khan, the zoo’s primary orangutan keeper, was off on medical leave. Yet she’d come in earlier in the day, as soon as she heard something was wrong with Mahal.