AuthorSheema Abdul Aziz, PhD Contributor / Project Pteropus, Rimba, Malaysia (https://rimba.ngo/project-pteropus/)

• Current Affairs
• Opinion

27 Mar 2020 All photos by Sanjitpaal Singh / Jitspics.com

The world is now in the throes of a COVID-19 pandemic.

Although the origin and cause of the outbreak have still not been identified, right from the beginning the media was rife with the usual inflammatory statements speculating bats to be the main suspects. 

There is still a lack of conclusive evidence tracing the disease back to bats – the actual SARS-CoV-2 virus has not even been detected in bats yet, and even if it is, this doesn’t prove a direct transmission route from bats to humans, as other factors (and possibly other animals) may have been involved in causing the outbreak.

Let’s not forget, bats were not recorded or reported to be at the Wuhan market when the outbreak started. Yet the supposed ‘bat origin’ of this so-called “bat-borne virus” was quickly propagated and accepted as fact amongst the general public.

This led to further irresponsible speculations quickly surfacing about the outbreak being caused by the consumption of “bat soup”—fake news that has now been debunked.

To this day, bats have not been proven to be the cause of the outbreak. Yet the psychological link between bats and COVID-19 has already been created and solidified in many people’s minds. 

Virologists, disease ecologists, public health officials and science communicators need to realise the impact their words have on the public psyche, and also on the wellbeing and conservation of bats.

Public speculation about the link between bats and diseases is dangerous and unhelpful—particularly when the supporting evidence is still weak. When bats continue to be framed so negatively in disease research and its media coverage, this results in unnecessary scaremongering that does nothing to help address the actual outbreak, but does instead stoke fear and hatred of bats—an already maligned animal group that continues to suffer from an undeserved negative public image.

This kind of storytelling is incredibly damaging and harmful. It threatens the safety of bat populations, and ultimately reduces support for bat conservation efforts. Indeed, the typical comments in response to such news is to call for the eradication of bats. 

Once people have been led to develop unnecessary fear and paranoia around bats, it becomes very difficult to counter this, even with positive messaging about the beneficial aspects of bats.

If people are being forced to make a psychological choice between ecosystem services and their own health and safety, it’s not hard to see what choice they’re going to make.

In my own work alone, potential project partners have declined to support our bat outreach efforts because they worry that being associated with bats will hurt their businesses due to the COVID-19 hysteria.

A member of the public even complained to a wildlife officer about my team catching and handling bats for research—spurred by an unfounded concern about COVID-19.

Modern zoonotic outbreaks are clearly driven by the environmental destruction wrought by humans. As such, the best prevention method is in fact conservation action to preserve wildlife habitat, maintain wildlife populations in the wild, and reduce contact between wildlife and humans/livestock.

This fact has long been recognised and championed by the holistic One Health approach that recognises how environmental, animal, and human health are intertwined, equally important, and must all be prioritised concurrently.

This crucial message needs to be repeatedly highlighted; however, even in this effort there needs to be careful and sensitive messaging to the public.

We must not teach people to fear close proximity with bats. We need people to appreciate, value, and celebrate the nature that’s on their doorstep, in a safe and respectful way.

Conservationists, disease researchers, and communicators should avoid creating an assumption that human health can only be safeguarded by a total and complete separation between people and bats.

This is highly counter-productive and can have disastrous effects in places where local communities coexist with bats in the same space, which is common in both rural and urban areas.

In some places, this close-proximity coexistence has been the norm for generations despite the availability of pristine, high-quality bat habitat right next door; bats do often make a deliberate choice to roost amongst or near humans for no discernible reason.

In other cases, a loss of habitat and food resources can drive bats to suddenly move into human-dominated areas. Once bats establish themselves in this way it is exceedingly difficult—close to impossible—to remove them, even with lethal methods.

The last thing we need is for people to start panicking over this ‘forced’ coexistence, especially in places where bats and humans have had such a long history of cohabiting safely without disease spillover.

Certainly, we should teach people the right ways to live safely with bats in order to prevent zoonotic spillover.

Culling bats should never be attempted or promoted as a form of disease prevention and control. Yet people who have been led to specifically fear bats as disease vectors often do exactly that. Already we are hearing reports of bats being burned to death in Indonesia by the authorities, beaten to death by members of the public in Australia, and even thrown down a rubbish chute by urban residents in Singapore.

In Singapore, wildlife managers are fielding complaints and removal requests from the public who don’t want bats around urban housing areas. The backlash is very real, and it’s already begun.

With bats playing such critical roles in maintaining ecosystem health, their disappearance could cause multiple ecosystems to unravel and ultimately collapse.

Killing bats thus simply creates a ticking time bomb, leading to a new ecological crisis we’ll have to deal with later down the line.

The more immediate, short-term risk of such action is that it facilitates greater exposure to, and transmission of, disease.

So aside from jeopardising the welfare of bats, nature, and long-term human wellbeing, people who attempt to eradicate bats put themselves in direct contact with stressed and panicked animals that are far more likely to transmit pathogens—ironically, the very nightmare scenario that disease researchers and public health officials are trying to prevent.

Negative portrayals of bats thus undermine conservation and public health goals equally.

Instead, disease researchers, public health officials and science communicators should collaborate and coordinate closely with bat researchers and conservationists to devise more constructive communication on this topic.

There should be an integrated effort to ensure that public messaging and community engagement is sensitively crafted, and responsibly executed. If we can commit to this common goal, and execute this more holistic and interdisciplinary approach, we’ll finally be able to produce the right kind of information and messages to the benefit of both bats and humans. Do you think animals are wrongly blamed for the spread of diseases? Tell us what you think at community@ricemedia.co.

AuthorSheema Abdul Aziz, PhD Contributor / Project Pteropus, Rimba, Malaysia (https://rimba.ngo/project-pteropus/)

By Merlin D. Tuttle

Misguided fears of bats as disease carriers threaten a valuable and important species.

It has been a bad decade for bats. Prior to the emergence of COVID-19, they were already in severe decline worldwide. Now, they are blamed as the culprits behind one of the costliest pandemics in modern history, even though the source and method of transmission haven’t been identified. Although scientists have an obligation to promptly disclose new threats, premature speculation about bats has been exaggerated in attention-grabbing media headlines. The result has been needless confusion, leading to the demonization, eviction, and slaughtering of bats even where they are most needed.

As of mid-March, “patient zero” for COVID-19 still had not been found, and who or what infected that person remains a mystery. There is even uncertainty about whether the viral jump from an unknown intermediate host to humans occurred in the location initially identified, an animal and seafood market in Wuhan, China. Despite these uncertainties, the media, with no small assistance from scientists, has sensationalized the risks, often without providing perspective, settling on bats as the likely culprit and thus making them targets in a viral witch hunt.

Around the world, bats are feeling the effects of this misinformation. My Malaysian colleague, Sheema Abdul Aziz, has spent years documenting the key role of flying fox bats as essential pollinators of Southeast Asia’s multibillion-dollar-a-year durian crop. Growers were planning to join her in a public education campaign explaining the value of bats, but now they fear a public backlash and are reluctant to support her efforts. A local resort has expressed fear of loss of sales due to a nearby flying fox colony. Fearing her research will trigger a new disease outbreak, private citizens have even asked the government to stop her from handling bats and to support eradication, something already reported in neighboring Indonesia. My colleagues in China are also deeply concerned about the demonization of bats and calls for their eradication.

Even in my home city of Austin, Texas, where we have safely enjoyed sharing a downtown bridge with 1.5 million bats for decades, growing numbers of people are asking about disease risks. Despite warnings from poorly informed health officials that our bats were rabid and dangerous, they’ve yet to transmit a single case of disease. They simply attract millions of tourist dollars each summer and control tons of crop pests each night. Texas bats are worth more than a billion dollars annually. Now bat-lovers are experiencing a backlash against putting up bat houses because neighbors say they fear that attracting bats will bring disease.

But simply telling people that bats are valuable and shouldn’t be killed can’t counter panic. I have personally investigated instances where fearful humans had burned, poisoned, or sealed caves, killing millions of bats at a time. Based on my experience, I have concluded that there is no greater threat than the intolerance and eradication that results from misguided fear.

Exaggerated warnings of bat disease risks aren’t just misguided. They threaten the health of entire ecosystems and economies. Researchers in Indonesia conservatively estimate that bats save cacao growers more than $700 million annually in avoided insect damage. In Mexico, tequila and mescal production worth billions annually relies on bats that pollinate agaves. From Southeast Asiato the Mediterranean, bats provide key pest control for rice growers. In South Africa, macadamia growers benefit from bat control of stink bugs.

Despite a long tradition of being misunderstood and feared, perhaps because of their nocturnal habits and erratic flight, bats have an outstanding record of living safely with humans. Millions living in backyard bat houses, city parks, and bridges have proven to be safe neighbors. I have never been attacked and am still healthy after more than 60 years studying and handling hundreds of species worldwide, sometimes surrounded by millions in caves. Because, like veterinarians, I am occasionally bitten by unfamiliar animals I handle, I’m vaccinated against rabies.

For anyone who simply avoids handling bats, the odds of contracting any disease from one are incalculably small. All diseases attributed to bats are easily avoided, even when bats live in one’s yard.

However, these facts typically go unreported, while risks are often magnified. The March 11 issue of Scientific American provides an excellent example. Its COVID-19 article subhead reads, “Wuhan-based virologist Shi Zhengli has identified dozens of deadly SARS-like viruses in bat caves, and she warns there are more out there.” The use of “deadly” is unjustified speculation.

The article additionally claims that the Wuhan outbreak is the sixth outbreak caused by bats in the past 26 years. In fact, the first four listed (SARS, MERS, Hendra, Ebola) appear to have been transmitted to people by animals other than bats—yet bats still receive primary blame. The fifth, the Nipah virus, which likely is spread to people from flying fox bats, is easily prevented by simply covering collection containers or pasteurizing contaminated palm juice.

Two possible scenarios have been hypothesized for the COVID-19 outbreak. The first is that a new coronavirus entered an intermediate host animal, such as a pangolin, where it evolved over an undetermined period to gradually become a threat to people. Alternatively, the new coronavirus could have been harmless when it first entered humans, but over time evolved to become virulent. Such scenarios would be difficult to predict, and a publication currently under review even points to mice and domestic pigs as possible sources.

So why has the media almost universally blamed bats? In part because scientists have disproportionately focused on sampling them.

Since 2005, when coronaviruses in horseshoe bats were first hypothesized to be the ancestors of the coronavirus that caused SARS, bats have received far more scrutiny than any other group of animals. For example, in the study on which the scariest headlines were based, researchers sampled nearly twice as many bats as rodents, shrews, and nonhuman primates combined and didn’t even include carnivores or ungulates.

Easily blamed, due to their lack of popularity, bats are also the easiest mammals to quickly sample in large numbers. This led to rapid publication of the results, and sensational speculations were deemed more acceptable when focused on already-feared animals.

Not surprisingly, more viruses have been found in bats than in less-surveyed species, so biased speculation has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. We don’t yet know if bats have more viruses than other animals because we haven’t similarly sampled others. And even if bats do have more, the number of viruses isn’t necessarily indicative of transmission risk. Many viruses are innocuous or possibly even beneficial.

Some virologists have capitalized on the fear of pandemics to promote funding for viral surveys in nature as a possible means of preventing or mitigating these scary events. They convinced the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to budget $4.8 billion in 2019 for surveys searching for potentially high-risk viruses. Referring to the COVID-19 pandemic, longtime surveying proponents now argue that the best way forward is to prevent future outbreaks by beginning with surveys to find and catalog wildlife viruses globally, focusing on what they consider to be high-risk animals, including bats.

However, many leading experts strongly disagree. They argue that such surveys would be extremely costly and have little practical value. Viral-caused outbreaks are exceedingly rare, and their emergence is unpredictable. The evolutionary virologist Edward Holmes and associates note that even if all current viruses could be cataloged, new variants of RNA viruses are constantly evolving. They bluntly warn of arrogance and loss of credibility resulting from promises that viral surveys could prevent or even mitigate pandemics.

To understand why surveying will fail as a strategy, consider the examples of MERS, West Nile, and Zika viruses. MERS jumped to humans from a seemingly unlikely source, camels, in Saudi Arabia, previously believed to be an extremely improbable location for such an incident. Robert Tesh, an expert on emerging viruses, has pointed out that neither West Nile nor Zika viruses are new. They simply spilled over when transported to new areas in incidents that couldn’t have been predicted.

A growing number of leading epidemiologists agree that it isn’t possible to predict the animal origin of the next viral outbreak. Unfortunately, their warnings are seldom covered by public media. When they are, they tend to be de-emphasized.

Finding the true source and means of infection for patient zero in the current outbreak seems far more important than condemning bats or spending billions on searches for potential pathogens. Such public health funds would be much better directed toward improved early detection in humans.

But we humans must also address our own culpability. Caging and slaughtering a wide variety of animals in markets virtually guarantees the spread of viral infections. Blaming already unpopular bats only increases already severe threats to their survival, despite scientific certainty about the enormous benefits they provide to both the environment and societies. Care about bats or not, we should see COVID-19 as a grim reminder that human well-being requires responsible stewardship of nature, not just dominance.

Merlin Tuttle is a leading bat researcher who founded and directed Bat Conservation International for 30 years. He now directs Merlin Tuttle’s Bat Conservation and is a research fellow in the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of Texas at Austin.