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I’m so torn on the bats thing. Many people have spent countless hours exposed to them and never gotten sick, and very few people get rabies from bats at all, s

I’m so torn on the bats thing. Many people have spent countless hours exposed to them and never gotten sick, and very few people get rabies from bats at all, so the risk appears very low. I suppose the people around them the most follow certain safety precautions that regular people don’t. Although cases are exceedingly rare (1-3 per year in the USA I think?), evidently that shoots up occasionally: https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2022/p0106-human-rabies.html https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2022/p0106-human-rabies.h... That link does make 5 cases up from 0 seem like a big deal, but… A chunk of that time was during quarantine time, and dropping from 1-3 to 0 isn’t so profound (though it’s far preferable, of course). M In any case, I wouldn’t wish rabies on anyone. I suppose I just wish we were less afraid of bats and able to help them flourish. Apart from rabies, they are incredible animals that do a lot of good for their ecosystems.

ak217 4y ago
Bats are uniquely dangerous to all other mammals because of how their immune system is different (due to the unique metabolic requirements of flight, they have evolved a system which allows viruses to remain active in the body instead of fully suppressing them). We knew this before COVID-19, COVID-19 is not the last bat-borne viral disease that will be a problem, and it is no coincidence that it came from bats. Bats are amazing but the way to let them flourish is to leave them alone and maximize conservation. Humans should not be commingling with bats (or even researching them as nonchalantly as we have been) until we get MUCH better at biomedical engineering and immunotherapy.
- steve_adams_86 4y ago
  That’s fascinating. I’m surprised I’d never heard that little detail about bats before. Or maybe I did, but didn’t realize the significance of it and it didn’t fully register. I agree about staying away from bats. I mean, if there’s a risk of rabies at all, I don’t want to go near a single one of them. But like you say, letting them be and conserving (or even restoring) their habitats would go a long way in supporting them. Ideally there would be no human interaction element. I suppose people worry that if bats flourish, we will encounter them more often. I’m not sure how likely that is at various scales. Say their populations double, would we see twice as many bats and see a doubling of rabies cases? I’m not sure.

ak217 4y ago

Bats are uniquely dangerous to all other mammals because of how their immune system is different (due to the unique metabolic requirements of flight, they have evolved a system which allows viruses to remain active in the body instead of fully suppressing them). We knew this before COVID-19, COVID-19 is not the last bat-borne viral disease that will be a problem, and it is no coincidence that it came from bats. Bats are amazing but the way to let them flourish is to leave them alone and maximize conservation. Humans should not be commingling with bats (or even researching them as nonchalantly as we have been) until we get MUCH better at biomedical engineering and immunotherapy.

steve_adams_86 4y ago
That’s fascinating. I’m surprised I’d never heard that little detail about bats before. Or maybe I did, but didn’t realize the significance of it and it didn’t fully register. I agree about staying away from bats. I mean, if there’s a risk of rabies at all, I don’t want to go near a single one of them. But like you say, letting them be and conserving (or even restoring) their habitats would go a long way in supporting them. Ideally there would be no human interaction element. I suppose people worry that if bats flourish, we will encounter them more often. I’m not sure how likely that is at various scales. Say their populations double, would we see twice as many bats and see a doubling of rabies cases? I’m not sure.