Bats don’t just host deadly diseases — they can tolerate them shockingly well.
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Bats get a bad rap in all forms of media — and it’s not entirely unwarranted. Whenever they hit the news, it’s typically paired with some deadly disease that they’ve somehow unleashed on humans: from Ebola to Hendra virus to Nipah virus to various coronaviruses such as SARS, MERS, and even Covid-19. Bats are just really good at hosting deadly diseases, so much so that researchers around the globe from Brazil to Australia to China are searching bat genomes for clues about the next potential outbreak.
But there’s another angle to consider.
Bats aren’t just very good at hosting deadly diseases. They seem to tolerate them very well. After all, we’re not finding caves full of dead bats that were struck down by Ebola or coronavirus. Exactly how they do this has been a mystery, but researchers think it might be because they evolved with a unique ability — they’re the only mammals who can fly.
When we stop looking at bats as simply reservoirs of deadly disease and start to look at them as the biological marvels they are, new doors open. Ones that could potentially unlock new approaches to how we treat disease in humans.
FURTHER READING (a lot of it…)
A link to Cara Brook’s lab if you’d like to follow up on her research: https://brooklab.org/cara-brook
This piece is written as a primer to help people better understand how incredible these animals are and what we stand to lose if they’re gone. Here are a few links about bat conservation and white-nose syndrome:
https://www.batcon.org/
https://www.nps.gov/articles/what-is-white-nose-syndrome.htm
For more about bats and finding the next pandemic (and why habitat destruction makes these outbreaks more likely):
https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/five-reasons-why-next-pandemic-could-come-bats
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/section/global-pandemic-bats-overview/
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-secret-weapon-in-preventing-the-next-pandemic-fruit-bats/
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/scientists-focus-on-bats-for-clues-to-prevent-next-pandemic
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-chinas-bat-woman-hunted-down-viruses-from-sars-to-the-new-coronavirus1/
https://www.propublica.org/article/australia-bats-hendra-research-pandemic-prevention
While we were working on this piece, the Atlantic released a great article about how bats can help fight aging you can find that here: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2023/11/bat-disease-virus-health-aging/675943/
And for more on how studying bats can help us treat diseases from viruses to cancer:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7341951/
https://www.unmc.edu/healthsecurity/transmission/2023/04/04/bats-shrug-off-viruses-and-rarely-get-cancer-were-trying-to-learn-from-them/
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-03128-0
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/989033
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