“With a lack of food, the young of the bats die and the starving adults move off into small aggregations where they start shedding virus - often in habitats they have never been seen in before.” We discovered that following a severe El Nino climatic event (high temperatures in the Pacific), the cold and rainy weather stops flower production,” said Hudson. “Normally bats live in large aggregations with thousands of bats in camps and they will move over large distances for their sugar rich nectar. Furthermore, their work provides a method to both predict and prevent them. While previous research has shown correlations between habitat loss and occurrence of pathogen spillover, this study reveals for the first time a mechanism for how and why viruses pass from bats to people. They documented more than 60 Hendra virus spillover events during the 25-year period. To link these data and seek insight into the causes the researchers utilized Bayesian network models. 16 in Nature, combined multiple datasets over 25 years on bat behavior, distributions, reproduction and food availability, along with records of climate, habitat loss and environmental conditions. Instead, the solution lies with preventing viral spillover from bats to humans. “The response to the pandemic has been to find ways to speed up vaccine development, but since infections invariably spread much faster than vaccine rollout, this reactive response will never stop a pandemic. Ebola, MERS, SARS, SARS-CoV-2, Nipah and Hendra are all good examples of this,” said Peter Hudson, Willaman Professor of Biology, Penn State. “One of the biggest challenges we face are threats arising from bat-borne viruses that spillover into humans and have the potential to cause pandemics. The team studied Hendra virus, a lethal virus that spills over from fruit bats to horses and then infects people. Bats disrupted by the lack of food move near humans in agricultural and urban areas.
The research, undertaken in Australia, found that when bats experience a loss of winter habitat and food shortages in their natural settings, their populations splinter and they excrete more virus. Preserving and restoring natural habitats in specific locations could prevent pathogens that originate in wildlife from spilling over into domesticated animals and humans, according to new research led by an international team of researchers, including Penn State.
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