Attractive, scary, and plentiful - night bats are a potential source of coronavirus. However, scientists think they are to blame for transmitting the disease that is changing our lives - it's the people.
Zoologists and disease experts told CNN that changes in human behavior - the destruction of natural habitats and faster transportation on land - have enabled diseases that were once remote and inaccessible to find their way to humanity.
Scientists do not yet know for sure where the virus originated from, and the only way to find out is to isolate the live virus in the suspected species, which is hard work.
But viruses very similar to what causes Covid-19 have been seen in Chinese nude nude. This correspondence has raised the question of how these diseases are transmitted by the bats - rarely affected by humans - around the world. To get an answer we need to think about how we treat the planet.
Night bats are the only flying mammals that allow them to disperse into the crowd from one community in large spaces, scientists said. This means that they can harbor a large number of pathogens or diseases in the body. Flight requires high levels of energy for the bats that have caused their immune systems to specialize.
"When they fly, they have a body temperature that resembles a fever," said Andrew Cunningham, professor of epidemiology at wildlife at Zoological Socety of London. ?It happens at least twice a day. When they leave the shelter to feed and when they return. The pathogens that have evolved into the bats of the night are accustomed to endure these changes in body temperature. ?
Cunningham says this turns into a problem when the disease passes to another species. In humans, for example, high temperature is the body's mechanism for killing viruses. A virus coming from the bats of the night is not affected by high temperatures in humans, he warned.
But why is the disease transmitted in the first place? The answer is simple, Cunningham said, and it involves an alien phase that we have to get used to as it has changed our lives - scabies or zoonotic transmission.
"People are always to blame for the zoonotic spread from bats or other wild animals to humans," Cunningham said. ?All this is causing human activities.
When a batsman is stressed - from hunting or habitat destruction from deforestation - his immune system is challenged and makes it more difficult to cope with pathogens that were once hard to beat. "We think that stress affects the bats in the same way as it affects humans," Cunningham said.
?Infections increase and are excreted. Suppose a person has the Herpes Simplex virus and gets a shingle on the lips. This is how the virus manifests itself. The same thing happens with bats at night. ?
At the epicenter of the virus - the livestock market in Wuhan, China - where wild and domestic animals were kept and sold together, a frightening number of viruses can be mixed.
"If shipped or kept in these markets, very close to other animals or humans," said Cunningham, "most likely a series of viruses will manifest." Other animals are also more vulnerable to viruses and infections when stressed.
"We're increasing the transportation of animals - for medicine, to keep them home, to eat them - to levels not recorded before," said Kate Jones, head of ecology and biodiversity at University College London.
"We are destroying habitats and turning them into areas populated by humans. Animals are mixing in strange ways like never before. In a livestock market, you find many animals in cages above each other. ?
Cunningam and Jones attribute the merit to only one factor in the rare cases when the zoonotic spread becomes a worldwide pandemic within a few weeks. "Historically, animal-to-human disease has passed, but that infected person would die or recover before coming into contact with thousands of people in a populated city," Cunningham said.
"Today, with the transportation provided, you can be in Central Africa at lunch and in London at dinner."
Jones agreed. "Every broadcast is made worse by the fact that there are so many people and we have developed transport."
They say that humanity must learn two lessons.
First, the bats are not to blame, but they can give us a solution. "It's very simple to point the species where the virus originated from," Cunningham said.
"But in fact, the way we interact with them has caused the spread of the pathogen to the pandemic level." He added that their immune systems are not well known and can provide valuable information. "Understanding how bats deal with these viruses, we can understand how to fight them, too."
In conclusion, coronaviruses will not disappear suddenly as long as humans grow and spread to areas that had not previously been affected. Cunningham and Jones think that changing human behavior would be simpler than developing a vaccine for each new virus.
Coronavirus is the first sign that environmental damage kills people as well. And it can happen again, for the same reasons.
"There are tens of thousands of viruses waiting to be discovered," Cunningham said. "We need to understand where the most zoonotic outbreaks occur and stop activity in those areas. This is the most effective way to protect people. ?
The damage we do to the planet damages us immediately and perhaps more severely.
Source: CNN
