It is nearly three years since South Africa went into hard lockdown as Covid-19 sank its claws into local communities, and the pandemic is likely to keep researchers busy for decades to come.
For an international group of researchers, the focus is on preventing the next one — and for that they have turned to more than two decades of data on the world’s most mythologised creature: the bat.
Seventy scientists from seven countries have come together to explore how bats transmit viruses, with the hope it will help predict how and when the next pandemic might strike.
Known as BatOneHealth, the group is focusing on spillover (of viruses from animals to humans) as “landscapes change to meet the growing demands of people, resulting in animal populations being forced to adapt and find new places to live and feed”.
This can “bring them closer into contact with people”.
Wanda Markotter, a local zoonotic disease expert who sits on several international virology panels, including at the World Health Organisation, told TimesLIVE Premium the group’s work is going to be valuable.
“History has shown most outbreaks and pandemics have an animal origin, with the majority spilling over from wildlife. Bats have been implicated in several of these, and that is why several studies globally are focusing on understanding the presence of the viruses in bats first but also how these infections work.”
The opportunity for contact between humans and bats needs to be understood, she said.
Examples she cites of this include the wildlife trade, bushmeat and human behaviour.
It is also useful to understand the characteristics of a virus.
“For example, most bat viruses are adapted to bats and cannot infect human cells. They will first have to adapt, and that will take a long time and many opportunities for contact with other species.”
She said BatOneHealth would look at “all these factors” and lauded the proposed studies as representing “essential approaches to understanding and preventing spillover from animals to humans from happening in the future”.
She said there are several studies such as this across the globe, including in South Africa.
In their recent publication in Nature, the scientists at BatOneHealth said “during recent decades pathogens that originated in bats have become an increasing public health concern”.
They said many studies associate spillover with changes in land use and other human-induced stressors, but “the mechanisms” underlying the correlations had not been identified.
To this end, as the group dives deeper into bat behaviour, their habitats and habits, a greater understanding of spillover opportunities will come to the fore.
The paper in Nature, which collated 25 years of data on land-use change, bat behaviour, and spillover, “show that bats are responding to environmental change by persistently adopting behaviours that were previously transient responses to nutritional stress”.
They said “interactions between land-use change and climate now lead to persistent bat residency in agricultural areas, where periodic food shortages drive clusters of spillovers”.
They concluded: “Our long-term study identifies the mechanistic connections between habitat loss, climate and increased spillover risk. It provides a framework for examining causes of bat virus spillover and for developing ecological countermeasures to prevent pandemics.”
The work being done is important, as up to 70% of human infectious diseases are zoonotic in nature (come from animals).
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