The open wound must have come into contact with some faeces in the bat-infested cave. Fruit bat faeces to be precise. Droppings from a species that carries more viruses inside its body than all of those stored in the world’s high security laboratories… So do fruit bats really pose such a risk to humans or was the Dutch woman’s case an extremely unlucky one-off? Humans have been afraid of bats for centuries.
In recent times, this fear has soared as scientists have proved that the animals carry viruses that cause deadly epidemics like Ebola – even though it is very rare for them to transmit the virus directly to humans. “It only happens if you are bitten or eat the meat of an infected fruit bat,” explains Tony Schountz from Colorado State University.
Or – as in Metesch’s case – when an open wound comes into contact with the animal’s saliva, blood or excrement. Which begs the question: if fruit bats carry deadly pathogens like the Ebola and Marburg viruses, why do they never fall ill themselves? Researchers have now discovered that while other animals and people die from these viruses, fruit bats won’t suffer so much as a fever.
On the contrary, their lifespan is ten times that of other similar-sized mammals and they almost never develop cancer. So does the key to healing also lie inside the fruit bats’ deadly cargo? Researchers are convinced it does and are now trying to uncover the secret of the fruit bat immune system. They hope that we may soon be able to thank fruit bats for improving our health – and even our life expectancies.
HOW DO YOU LIVE WITH A DEADLY ENEMY IN YOUR BODY? For that to become a reality, scientists first need to understand how fruit bats can live seemingly healthy lives unharmed by the pathogens lurking in their cells. The virologist Linfa Wang from Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore has researched just that.
He spent almost two decades in Australia studying fruit bats and how they transmit the deadly Hendra virus to horses. Wang discovered that, unlike other mammals, the fruit bats could control the virus. They displayed neither a fever nor a raised level of white blood cells in their blood. But how did their immune systems somehow render the virus harmless?
