8 ms·

Bats and the Origin of Outbreaks

71 points by jordinebot 6y ago

dgellow 6y ago
I love those illustrations
croon 6y ago
Not really related, other than bat dispersion models, but I always found this fascinating: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_bomb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_bomb
thunderbong 6y ago
Dup: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26325442 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26325442 (70 comments)
seanwilson 6y ago
> Changes in the environment are driving displaced species of animals into new habitats, allowing them to mix with other species or potential hosts. Outside of reactionary comments about banning eating bats and banning "wet markets", I wish there was more serious discussion about how intensive animal farming in general could lead to another pandemic and what we're going to do about it. We're just going to continue as normal until a pandemic kicks off from cows, pigs or chickens? On top of just the number of animals treated with antibiotics being kept in close proximity to help a virus mutate, there's also the animal waste produced, the land required and the contributions to climate change that are destroying the environment and displacing species.
- chasil 6y ago
  There is considerable suspicion that SARS-CoV-2 was enhanced by the Wuhan lab. The simple fact that the species carrying the closest relative of this epidemic was a thousand miles away from Wuhan and was not present at the wet markets in any capacity is sufficient to doubt the narrative. If we want to safeguard our species from zoonotic pandemics, instead of weaponizing them, then a vaccination effort would be better directed at the source. Perhaps an international effort to identify dangerous zoonotic pathogens and address them within their natural hosts is preferable to what COVID-19 has forced us to endure.
  - Pyramus 6y ago
    "Considerable suspicion" is over-selling it in my opinion. The arguments I've heard go along the lines of 'the virus is surprisingly well adapted to humans'. This reasoning, however, is text-book survivor bias: Given we observe a pandemic, the probability for the virus to be well adapted is very high. What we do know is: * There is a highest safety level virus lab in Wuhan. * Lab escapes do and did happen. As far as I know we simply do not have evidence if or if not gain of function research played a role. \edit: formatting. Can somebody please explain the downvotes?
    - mckirk 6y ago
      It might be that people are taking issue with the survivorship-bias argument. The important question here is: Given a virus that is as well adapted to humans as SARS-CoV-2, how likely is it that it emerged spontaneously (without a trace of any intermediate states, afaik) vs. how likely is it that it leaked from a lab that has high safety standards, but was probably producing viruses just like it. It is indeed not surprising that the virus is well adapted to humans, seeing as we are experiencing a pandemic, but that is disconnected from wondering how it got to be so.
      - Uberphallus 6y ago
        > (without a trace of any intermediate states, afaik) It's pretty clear that SARS-CoV-2 shares an ancestor with RaTG13 [0]. Their S-proteins, the main factor in human adaptation, are a 97.8% match, which can be explained with about a decade of divergence, putting the common ancestor somewhere in late 2000s. Why RaTG13 (then called RaBtCoV/4991) research was shelved by China, when it's been one of the suspects of the death of 3 miners with SARS-like symptoms in 2012[1], is the concerning part of it all. The chances of it being lab made/grown/modified are just way too slim. [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41594-020-0468-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41594-020-0468-7 [1] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/03/new-killer-virus-china https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/03/new-killer-virus-chi...
    - trevelyan 6y ago
      > As far as I know we simply do not have evidence if or if not gain of function research played a role. You can examine phylogenetic distance -- the degree of evolutionary drift that the initial virus had from others which are subject to natural (in-the-wild) evolution. COVID is way out there. And even then the closest "natural" virus had its genome published by the Wuhan lab long after the initial outbreak. The lack of any close relatives suggests that gain-of-function very well may have taken place, as does the heightened vulnerability of typical lab-animals. What there isn't much evidence of is zoonotic transfer.
- bluGill 6y ago
  You clearly don't know much about modern farming, but do not a lot about the tropes that the anti-animal agriculture movement have brought out. Antibiotics are not functional against viruses. They don't make any difference. Where antibiotics are used it must be under qualified medical care, farmers can't just go buy them at the corner store, any more than you can. (15 years ago they could buy them, I don't remember exactly when the laws changed) Even when they are used (never in chickens), there can be not detectable antibiotics in food, and we can detect very tiny amounts. Animals in close proximity are very isolated. Farmers have strict bio security rules before you can enter the barns.
  - seanwilson 6y ago
    Yep, I muddled words there but antibiotic resistance is a related concern: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibiotic_use_in_livestock#Antibiotic_resistance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibiotic_use_in_livestock#An... "This is a growing matter of concern as antibiotic resistance is considered to be a serious future threat to human welfare.[10] Infectious diseases are the third leading cause of death in Europe and a future without effective antibiotics would fundamentally change the way modern medicine is practised.[10][12]" > Animals in close proximity are very isolated. Farmers have strict bio security rules before you can enter the barns. How does this explain the number of outbreaks of swine flu in multiple countries? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_A_virus_subtype_H1N1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_A_virus_subtype_H1N1
- snarf21 6y ago
  So true. A lot of our virus come from birds. Viruses are like most invasive species. If you take them out of their normal habitat, they can thrive in a way that is unexpected and uncontrollable.
- fragmede 6y ago
  I don’t know where you’ve been, but bird flu and swine flu were already epidemics. Do we really have to wait for a cow-related disease to become an epidemic and finish up the trifecta before we’ll consider changing our behavior?
- LatteLazy 6y ago
  Sorry, what is reactionary about banning wet markets? Not trying to be confrontational, I'm honestly asking. They're banned pretty much everywhere in the west with the exception of fish. There is plenty to object to about Western animal agriculture, but it hasn't created any new diseases on the scale of covid since it industrialised...
controlweather 6y ago
What a stupid article
ovi256 6y ago
The WHO seems to be under Chinese control. Their investigations should not be expected to embarrass China in any way. They'll produce an innocuous conclusion.
- djitz 6y ago
  People are downvoting you while journalists who tried to expose these truths rot in Chinese prisons.
0x737368 6y ago
How about it leaking from a research facility?
- neartheplain 6y ago
  That question remains open. https://thebulletin.org/2021/02/who-covid-19-didnt-leak-from-a-lab-also-who-maybe-it-did/ https://thebulletin.org/2021/02/who-covid-19-didnt-leak-from...
- luxuryballs 6y ago
  Yeah and it’s clear that they are making this stuff too: “Utilizing the SARS-CoV infectious clone, we generated and characterized a chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse adapted SARS-CoV backbone” https://www.med.unc.edu/orfeome/files/2018/03/a-sars-like-cluster-of-circulating-bat-coronaviruses-shows-potential-for-human-emergence.pdf https://www.med.unc.edu/orfeome/files/2018/03/a-sars-like-cl... another interesting find: http://ge.usembassy.gov/fact-sheet-activity-at-the-wuhan-institute-of-virology/ http://ge.usembassy.gov/fact-sheet-activity-at-the-wuhan-ins... The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses. This raises questions about the credibility of WIV senior researcher Shi Zhengli’s public claim that there was “zero infection” among the WIV’s staff and students of SARS-CoV-2 or SARS-related viruses. Accidental infections in labs have caused several previous virus outbreaks in China and elsewhere, including a 2004 SARS outbreak in Beijing that infected nine people, killing one. The CCP has prevented independent journalists, investigators, and global health authorities from interviewing researchers at the WIV, including those who were ill in the fall of 2019. Any credible inquiry into the origin of the virus must include interviews with these researchers and a full accounting of their previously unreported illness.
  - dominicjj 6y ago
    >This raises questions about the credibility of WIV senior researcher Shi Zhengli It's a straightforward although time-consuming exercise to trace through Shi's research from the last 15 years and see that she and her team have clearly been developing a bioweapon based on SARS and gain of function stuff pasted in from bat coronaviruses and elsewhere.
nisa 6y ago
Alina Chan looks from a scientific perspektive at the lableak hypothesis and it's unresolved as far as I know: https://twitter.com/Ayjchan https://twitter.com/Ayjchan Bascially we don't know and probably won't know. The conflict of interest with the WHO mission is pretty clear. Beyond any politicization of the issue it's interesting to learn about the possibilities and risks in that research area.
- RedneckBob 6y ago
  Any credibility to the study released by this Dr. Steven Quay? He seems to have uncovered ample evidence, that in the case of COVID19, it was leaked from a lab. "A Bayesian analysis concludes beyond a reasonable doubt that SARS-CoV-2 is not a natural zoonosis but instead is laboratory derived" - https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/new-study-by-dr-steven-quay-concludes-that-sars-cov-2-came-from-a-laboratory-301217952.html https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/new-study-by-dr-ste... The first 12 pages of the PDF read like a sci-fy thriller. Link to the PDF (scroll down the page a bit): - https://zenodo.org/record/4477081 https://zenodo.org/record/4477081
  - nisa 6y ago
    this looks like quack bullshit - I'd be very careful what to believe. Just look at page 6 that makes some arbitrary calculations and the bold headline. I'd skip that as evidence.
  - Robotbeat 6y ago
    We discussed this in the past. While it is possible it escaped from the lab, his argument that it was not natural is not terribly compelling. That it reads like a sci-fi thriller is kind of a tell.
  - ozborn 6y ago
    No credibility. In this poorly written paper the only interesting claim he cites is that some portion of SARS-Cov-2 looks like a "vector" sequence, but it's really just looking like a naturally occurring coronavirus and he confuses plasmid vs a vector. See: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/22221751.2020.1738279 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/22221751.2020.1... Just because the Chinese government lies a lot, it doesn't mean they are lying about this. There is no need.
jostmey 6y ago
> Scientist have long suspected that the rate of new infectious diseases could accelerate, especially in developing countries where human and animal interaction is increasing. I don't know any "Scientist" making this claim, and I work at a research University. Humans have always lived in direct contact with animals. We evolved from the Natural world living with animals in the forest, desert, and grassland. What has changed is that there are more people and we are more interconnected than ever. So in the past, if someone were exposed to a novel coronavirus, the infection wouldn't leave the village, but now it spreads across the globe in a matter of months.
- pharmakom 6y ago
  Yeah... surely industrialised animal farming is to blame?
- _Microft 6y ago
  Wikipedia has some pointers in the right direction in the article on Zoonosis if someone is curious. See section „Causes - Deforestation, biodiversity loss and environmental degradation“. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoonosis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoonosis
avl999 6y ago
Maybe we should consider getting rid of esp problematic species of bats that are host to the most pathogens. I personally don't see much value in the species. They are like the mosquitos of the mammal world.
- Robotbeat 6y ago
  Maybe vaccinate them instead.
- mattbk1 6y ago
  Bats eat mosquitos, which can carry other diseases. Whether yo u see any value in the species doesn't really have a bearing on protecting biodiversity.
Threeve303 6y ago
This article doesn't seem to state what it is about bats that leads them to be "disease reservoirs". EDIT: Removed speculation
- wycy 6y ago
  I once read that there's something somewhat unique about the immune system of bats (very permissive?) that allows viruses to live in bats relatively undisturbed, allowing them a lot of time to mutate and thrive without affecting the bats much. Edit: "Several studies have indicated that bats have unique defense mechanisms that allow them to be persistently or latently infected with viruses. Factors leading to an increase in the viral load of persistently infected bats would facilitate shedding of virus." Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6410205/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6410205/
tiahura 6y ago
Is there a compelling reason to not nuke these massive bat colony caves?
todd8 6y ago
Discussion five days ago of this Reuters article on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26325442 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26325442
fireeyed 6y ago
The question news media and “investigative journalism” if it exists anymore needs to ask is how come this particular outbreak/ transmission from bats didn’t happen before 2019. The “wet markets” exist all over China and people consumed bats before 2019.
- jackalo 6y ago
  Why didn’t the integrated circuit happen before Bob Noyce and his team released it when we had been using all the raw components in some form for a long time? Things aren’t required to occur 100% of the time just because the raw bits are there. Sometimes these things take time.
herodotus 6y ago
It seems that the route of infection is through large amounts of the virus being inhaled. What this article does not explain is how this route of transmission can occur from bats to humans. Did it perhaps start when someone went into a bat cave? Otherwise it seems unlikely to me that an infected bat can transmit this particular virus.
- dvh 6y ago
  Bats are eaten in China. Half cooked bat could transmit the disease.
  - michaelrubin 6y ago
    Do we have evidence that ingesting infected tissue can transmit the disease? I thought the disease spread via inhalation of viral particles?
    - Pyramus 6y ago
      Yes, simply placing the infected tissue in your mouth can infect you. The exact role of fomite transmission of SARS-CoV-2 is still unclear (in any case we do not eat one another) however we do know it is minor relative to respiratory droplets and aerosols.
dzonga 6y ago
beautiful site. but this notion, that covid-19 came from bats is tricky. origin tracing a virus is tricky, specially one year too late. and the wuhan wet market didn't house bats. origins of covid-19 could be from anything whether the virus leaked from a lab, due to lax security policies. some other carrier animal or human we will never figure out etc.

71 points by jordinebot 6y ago

I love those illustrations

Not really related, other than bat dispersion models, but I always found this fascinating: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_bomb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_bomb

thunderbong 6y ago

Dup: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26325442 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26325442 (70 comments)

seanwilson 6y ago

> Changes in the environment are driving displaced species of animals into new habitats, allowing them to mix with other species or potential hosts. Outside of reactionary comments about banning eating bats and banning "wet markets", I wish there was more serious discussion about how intensive animal farming in general could lead to another pandemic and what we're going to do about it. We're just going to continue as normal until a pandemic kicks off from cows, pigs or chickens? On top of just the number of animals treated with antibiotics being kept in close proximity to help a virus mutate, there's also the animal waste produced, the land required and the contributions to climate change that are destroying the environment and displacing species.

chasil 6y ago
There is considerable suspicion that SARS-CoV-2 was enhanced by the Wuhan lab. The simple fact that the species carrying the closest relative of this epidemic was a thousand miles away from Wuhan and was not present at the wet markets in any capacity is sufficient to doubt the narrative. If we want to safeguard our species from zoonotic pandemics, instead of weaponizing them, then a vaccination effort would be better directed at the source. Perhaps an international effort to identify dangerous zoonotic pathogens and address them within their natural hosts is preferable to what COVID-19 has forced us to endure.
- Pyramus 6y ago
  "Considerable suspicion" is over-selling it in my opinion. The arguments I've heard go along the lines of 'the virus is surprisingly well adapted to humans'. This reasoning, however, is text-book survivor bias: Given we observe a pandemic, the probability for the virus to be well adapted is very high. What we do know is: * There is a highest safety level virus lab in Wuhan. * Lab escapes do and did happen. As far as I know we simply do not have evidence if or if not gain of function research played a role. \edit: formatting. Can somebody please explain the downvotes?
  - mckirk 6y ago
    It might be that people are taking issue with the survivorship-bias argument. The important question here is: Given a virus that is as well adapted to humans as SARS-CoV-2, how likely is it that it emerged spontaneously (without a trace of any intermediate states, afaik) vs. how likely is it that it leaked from a lab that has high safety standards, but was probably producing viruses just like it. It is indeed not surprising that the virus is well adapted to humans, seeing as we are experiencing a pandemic, but that is disconnected from wondering how it got to be so.
    - Uberphallus 6y ago
      > (without a trace of any intermediate states, afaik) It's pretty clear that SARS-CoV-2 shares an ancestor with RaTG13 [0]. Their S-proteins, the main factor in human adaptation, are a 97.8% match, which can be explained with about a decade of divergence, putting the common ancestor somewhere in late 2000s. Why RaTG13 (then called RaBtCoV/4991) research was shelved by China, when it's been one of the suspects of the death of 3 miners with SARS-like symptoms in 2012[1], is the concerning part of it all. The chances of it being lab made/grown/modified are just way too slim. [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41594-020-0468-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41594-020-0468-7 [1] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/03/new-killer-virus-china https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/03/new-killer-virus-chi...
  - trevelyan 6y ago
    > As far as I know we simply do not have evidence if or if not gain of function research played a role. You can examine phylogenetic distance -- the degree of evolutionary drift that the initial virus had from others which are subject to natural (in-the-wild) evolution. COVID is way out there. And even then the closest "natural" virus had its genome published by the Wuhan lab long after the initial outbreak. The lack of any close relatives suggests that gain-of-function very well may have taken place, as does the heightened vulnerability of typical lab-animals. What there isn't much evidence of is zoonotic transfer.
bluGill 6y ago
You clearly don't know much about modern farming, but do not a lot about the tropes that the anti-animal agriculture movement have brought out. Antibiotics are not functional against viruses. They don't make any difference. Where antibiotics are used it must be under qualified medical care, farmers can't just go buy them at the corner store, any more than you can. (15 years ago they could buy them, I don't remember exactly when the laws changed) Even when they are used (never in chickens), there can be not detectable antibiotics in food, and we can detect very tiny amounts. Animals in close proximity are very isolated. Farmers have strict bio security rules before you can enter the barns.
- seanwilson 6y ago
  Yep, I muddled words there but antibiotic resistance is a related concern: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibiotic_use_in_livestock#Antibiotic_resistance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibiotic_use_in_livestock#An... "This is a growing matter of concern as antibiotic resistance is considered to be a serious future threat to human welfare.[10] Infectious diseases are the third leading cause of death in Europe and a future without effective antibiotics would fundamentally change the way modern medicine is practised.[10][12]" > Animals in close proximity are very isolated. Farmers have strict bio security rules before you can enter the barns. How does this explain the number of outbreaks of swine flu in multiple countries? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_A_virus_subtype_H1N1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_A_virus_subtype_H1N1
snarf21 6y ago
So true. A lot of our virus come from birds. Viruses are like most invasive species. If you take them out of their normal habitat, they can thrive in a way that is unexpected and uncontrollable.
fragmede 6y ago
I don’t know where you’ve been, but bird flu and swine flu were already epidemics. Do we really have to wait for a cow-related disease to become an epidemic and finish up the trifecta before we’ll consider changing our behavior?
LatteLazy 6y ago
Sorry, what is reactionary about banning wet markets? Not trying to be confrontational, I'm honestly asking. They're banned pretty much everywhere in the west with the exception of fish. There is plenty to object to about Western animal agriculture, but it hasn't created any new diseases on the scale of covid since it industrialised...

controlweather 6y ago

What a stupid article

ovi256 6y ago

The WHO seems to be under Chinese control. Their investigations should not be expected to embarrass China in any way. They'll produce an innocuous conclusion.

djitz 6y ago
People are downvoting you while journalists who tried to expose these truths rot in Chinese prisons.

0x737368 6y ago

How about it leaking from a research facility?

neartheplain 6y ago
That question remains open. https://thebulletin.org/2021/02/who-covid-19-didnt-leak-from-a-lab-also-who-maybe-it-did/ https://thebulletin.org/2021/02/who-covid-19-didnt-leak-from...
luxuryballs 6y ago
Yeah and it’s clear that they are making this stuff too: “Utilizing the SARS-CoV infectious clone, we generated and characterized a chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse adapted SARS-CoV backbone” https://www.med.unc.edu/orfeome/files/2018/03/a-sars-like-cluster-of-circulating-bat-coronaviruses-shows-potential-for-human-emergence.pdf https://www.med.unc.edu/orfeome/files/2018/03/a-sars-like-cl... another interesting find: http://ge.usembassy.gov/fact-sheet-activity-at-the-wuhan-institute-of-virology/ http://ge.usembassy.gov/fact-sheet-activity-at-the-wuhan-ins... The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses. This raises questions about the credibility of WIV senior researcher Shi Zhengli’s public claim that there was “zero infection” among the WIV’s staff and students of SARS-CoV-2 or SARS-related viruses. Accidental infections in labs have caused several previous virus outbreaks in China and elsewhere, including a 2004 SARS outbreak in Beijing that infected nine people, killing one. The CCP has prevented independent journalists, investigators, and global health authorities from interviewing researchers at the WIV, including those who were ill in the fall of 2019. Any credible inquiry into the origin of the virus must include interviews with these researchers and a full accounting of their previously unreported illness.
- dominicjj 6y ago
  >This raises questions about the credibility of WIV senior researcher Shi Zhengli It's a straightforward although time-consuming exercise to trace through Shi's research from the last 15 years and see that she and her team have clearly been developing a bioweapon based on SARS and gain of function stuff pasted in from bat coronaviruses and elsewhere.

nisa 6y ago

Alina Chan looks from a scientific perspektive at the lableak hypothesis and it's unresolved as far as I know: https://twitter.com/Ayjchan https://twitter.com/Ayjchan Bascially we don't know and probably won't know. The conflict of interest with the WHO mission is pretty clear. Beyond any politicization of the issue it's interesting to learn about the possibilities and risks in that research area.

RedneckBob 6y ago
Any credibility to the study released by this Dr. Steven Quay? He seems to have uncovered ample evidence, that in the case of COVID19, it was leaked from a lab. "A Bayesian analysis concludes beyond a reasonable doubt that SARS-CoV-2 is not a natural zoonosis but instead is laboratory derived" - https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/new-study-by-dr-steven-quay-concludes-that-sars-cov-2-came-from-a-laboratory-301217952.html https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/new-study-by-dr-ste... The first 12 pages of the PDF read like a sci-fy thriller. Link to the PDF (scroll down the page a bit): - https://zenodo.org/record/4477081 https://zenodo.org/record/4477081
- nisa 6y ago
  this looks like quack bullshit - I'd be very careful what to believe. Just look at page 6 that makes some arbitrary calculations and the bold headline. I'd skip that as evidence.
- Robotbeat 6y ago
  We discussed this in the past. While it is possible it escaped from the lab, his argument that it was not natural is not terribly compelling. That it reads like a sci-fi thriller is kind of a tell.
- ozborn 6y ago
  No credibility. In this poorly written paper the only interesting claim he cites is that some portion of SARS-Cov-2 looks like a "vector" sequence, but it's really just looking like a naturally occurring coronavirus and he confuses plasmid vs a vector. See: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/22221751.2020.1738279 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/22221751.2020.1... Just because the Chinese government lies a lot, it doesn't mean they are lying about this. There is no need.

jostmey 6y ago

> Scientist have long suspected that the rate of new infectious diseases could accelerate, especially in developing countries where human and animal interaction is increasing. I don't know any "Scientist" making this claim, and I work at a research University. Humans have always lived in direct contact with animals. We evolved from the Natural world living with animals in the forest, desert, and grassland. What has changed is that there are more people and we are more interconnected than ever. So in the past, if someone were exposed to a novel coronavirus, the infection wouldn't leave the village, but now it spreads across the globe in a matter of months.

pharmakom 6y ago
Yeah... surely industrialised animal farming is to blame?
_Microft 6y ago
Wikipedia has some pointers in the right direction in the article on Zoonosis if someone is curious. See section „Causes - Deforestation, biodiversity loss and environmental degradation“. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoonosis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoonosis

avl999 6y ago

Maybe we should consider getting rid of esp problematic species of bats that are host to the most pathogens. I personally don't see much value in the species. They are like the mosquitos of the mammal world.

Robotbeat 6y ago
Maybe vaccinate them instead.
mattbk1 6y ago
Bats eat mosquitos, which can carry other diseases. Whether yo u see any value in the species doesn't really have a bearing on protecting biodiversity.

Threeve303 6y ago

This article doesn't seem to state what it is about bats that leads them to be "disease reservoirs". EDIT: Removed speculation

wycy 6y ago
I once read that there's something somewhat unique about the immune system of bats (very permissive?) that allows viruses to live in bats relatively undisturbed, allowing them a lot of time to mutate and thrive without affecting the bats much. Edit: "Several studies have indicated that bats have unique defense mechanisms that allow them to be persistently or latently infected with viruses. Factors leading to an increase in the viral load of persistently infected bats would facilitate shedding of virus." Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6410205/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6410205/

tiahura 6y ago

Is there a compelling reason to not nuke these massive bat colony caves?

todd8 6y ago

Discussion five days ago of this Reuters article on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26325442 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26325442

fireeyed 6y ago

The question news media and “investigative journalism” if it exists anymore needs to ask is how come this particular outbreak/ transmission from bats didn’t happen before 2019. The “wet markets” exist all over China and people consumed bats before 2019.

jackalo 6y ago
Why didn’t the integrated circuit happen before Bob Noyce and his team released it when we had been using all the raw components in some form for a long time? Things aren’t required to occur 100% of the time just because the raw bits are there. Sometimes these things take time.

herodotus 6y ago

It seems that the route of infection is through large amounts of the virus being inhaled. What this article does not explain is how this route of transmission can occur from bats to humans. Did it perhaps start when someone went into a bat cave? Otherwise it seems unlikely to me that an infected bat can transmit this particular virus.

dvh 6y ago
Bats are eaten in China. Half cooked bat could transmit the disease.
- michaelrubin 6y ago
  Do we have evidence that ingesting infected tissue can transmit the disease? I thought the disease spread via inhalation of viral particles?
  - Pyramus 6y ago
    Yes, simply placing the infected tissue in your mouth can infect you. The exact role of fomite transmission of SARS-CoV-2 is still unclear (in any case we do not eat one another) however we do know it is minor relative to respiratory droplets and aerosols.

dzonga 6y ago

beautiful site. but this notion, that covid-19 came from bats is tricky. origin tracing a virus is tricky, specially one year too late. and the wuhan wet market didn't house bats. origins of covid-19 could be from anything whether the virus leaked from a lab, due to lax security policies. some other carrier animal or human we will never figure out etc.