WNS Leads to Increased Infant Mortality
September 6, 2024
An important new study, recently published in Science and widely covered by major newspapers like The Guardian, The Washington Post, and The New York Times, has
If public health concerns were based on actual threats to human mortality, diseases speculated to be spread by bats would take a distant back seat. Even our beloved dogs are many times more dangerous than bats (1). Real killers, like consumption of over processed and contaminated foods dwarf any risks associated with animals (2).
Yet we squander millions of scarce public health dollars on witch hunts for rare diseases in bats, when those funds could save far more human lives if spent on reducing already proven killers such as obesity and environmental toxicants linked to escalating rates of cancer, heart disease, dementia and diabetes.
In recent years speculation linking scary diseases to bats has gained unprecedented media headlines and grants.
Discoveries of dozens of new viruses in bats have been announced as though they were major breakthroughs in human disease prevention (3). By comparison a recent study discovered hundreds of previously undescribed viruses in a single human (4). Given our minuscule knowledge of viruses, new ones can be found wherever we look. And since all life on earth is related at some level, it’s easy to claim scary sounding relationships that may be irrelevant or even beneficial to public health (5).
For most of human history we shared caves, then thatched huts and log cabins with bats. Only in recent decades have humans begun living in buildings that exclude bats. So it stands to reason that we should have evolved extraordinary resistance to each other’s diseases. And that appears to be the case.
While media headlines scream of bats as dangerous reservoirs for a wide variety of diseases (6), I and hundreds of other bat researchers remain in good health, despite countless hours of close contact, often surrounded by thousands or even millions of bats in caves. Like veterinarians we are vaccinated against rabies because we are sometimes bitten in self-defense by the animals we handle. However for people who simply don’t handle bats, the odds of contracting any bat-borne disease are close to zero.
Those wishing to scare us about bats are ignoring an incredible safety record. Throughout the Old World tropics, where the most feared pathogens reside, many thousands of people hunt and eat bats each year, and others work long hours extracting bat guano for fertilizer from their caves. Yet there is still no proof that the “potentially devastating pathogen outbreaks” we’ve been warned about have ever been caused by bats.
The search for an Ebola reservoir provides an enlightening example of how a race for lucrative, grant- getting headlines can bias science, harm public health and destroy valuable bat populations. Colonial bats are by far the easiest mammals to quickly sample in large numbers, making them tempting targets for quickly publishable virus research. However, after spending millions of dollars disproportionately testing large numbers of bats, there is still no scientifically credible evidence linking bats to Ebola (7).
Despite failure to find the virus in any bat species examined, during the summer of 2014 media headlines worldwide claimed that the two-year-old toddler, considered to be the “index case,” likely got Ebola from a straw-colored fruit bat (8). No one has ever been able to explain how this child may have contacted a three-foot-wingspan bat that never enters buildings without anyone knowing it, nor how thousands of Africans hunt and eat these bats without documented harm. Straw-colored fruit bats were simply believed guilty!
By December of 2014 researchers concluded that the same child likely was infected by playing near a free-tailed bat roost, again with no credible substantiation. Few, if any animals other than bats were tested and no Ebola virus was found. Nevertheless the bats were burned and their roost permanently destroyed (9).
In December of 2015 researchers reported that the straw-colored fruit bats, which had been blamed for years, were so highly resistant to Ebola infection that they were an unlikely reservoir. They further noted that “infectious Ebola viruses have never been recovered from bats” (7).
Due to exaggerated media speculation, supported by woefully biased and inadequate science prematurely reported, bats are now erroneously “known” as the source of Ebola, the most recent discovery having received minimal coverage. Simply saying that bats are beneficial can’t save them from those who increasingly fear and kill them. It’s time to end the bat witch hunt and put public health dollars back where they belong.
References
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An important new study, recently published in Science and widely covered by major newspapers like The Guardian, The Washington Post, and The New York Times, has
On March 6, 2024, the Wall Street Journal presented findings from the University of Leeds in their opinion piece, “Why Scientists Love Chasing Bats; The
Believe it or not, bats have one of our planet’s finest records of living safely with humans. Despite frequent claims to the contrary, they harbor
Good science attempts to disprove, not prove, hypotheses1. Yet, for more than a decade, a growing number of virologists and epidemiologists have attempted to prove
2024 © Merlin Tuttle’s Bat Conservation. All rights reserved.
Michael Lazari Karapetian has over twenty years of investment management experience. He has a degree in business management, is a certified NBA agent, and gained early experience as a money manager for the Bank of America where he established model portfolios for high-net-worth clients. In 2003 he founded Lazari Capital Management, Inc. and Lazari Asset Management, Inc. He is President and CIO of both and manages over a half a billion in assets. In his personal time he champions philanthropic causes. He serves on the board of Moravian College and has a strong affinity for wildlife, both funding and volunteering on behalf of endangered species.