Page 8 - Vampire Bat News Today

The missing link we were looking for. >> that link was a bat virus genetically connected to sars. capable of jumping directly from bats to humans. >> that really was the nail in the coffin for us in terms of this coming from bats. >> dr. shi told us bat-borne viruses will cause more outbreaks. we need to find them before they find us. >> that original sars coronavirus in 2003 started in guangdong province, china, spread to hong kong, taiwan, and then the rest of the world, causing 8,000 cases an...

2019, thats when the team in wuhan began to investigate the strange new virus. the genetic sequence of the virus was mapped fairly quickly. dr. shi compared it to a database of 500 new coronaviruses previously identified by ecohealth alliances. there was a match. its official name became sars cov-2. the virus that calls covid-19. called covid-19 because it emerged in 2019. the new coronavirus was 96.2% similar to a sample taken from a horseshoe bat in 2013. so what does that mean exactly? >> wel...

Thats one of the issues with these wet markets. for bats, they have coronaviruses that theyve adapted to and theyre totally fine. but you put them in a wet market situation, they get sick, they get stressed, they succumb just like if you work too hard and you suddenly come down with that flu. the bats get overworked. >> sometimes with zoonotic spillover, there can also be an intermediary animal. so bats transmit to another species and then that species transmits to humans. in the case of covid-1...

>> when the wing is around the face like that, theyre using their wings as built-in blanket. >> dangeli is part of a larger movement thats been taking place for the last three decades in the united states, teaching people why these creatures should be protected, not feared. >> were all here for one purpose and for one target, one direction. and thats to help these animals and to help people understand why these animals need our assistan assistance. theyre so much like us. they are different-look...

>> and the signal to all sorts of cells that have not become infected, a virus is here. turn on your defense system. >> and typically this manifests in inflammation. >> the in humans inflammation helps fight fever. too long, it can do more harm than good. it can even cause death. >> typically more than half the damage that results in disease tends to be the damage of the immune system attacking the disease itself. >> thats how the disease stops. >> but bats immune systems dont respond the same w...

>> some bat species actually migrate thousands of miles, and hence the viruses that they carry traffic along those migratory routes. >> and though some of the pathogens bats play host to can make them sick, like rabies, they also have the unique ability to host and withstand some viruses without getting sick. >> understanding how bats co-exist with diseases is very critical. bats have a very unique relationship with pathogens generally. they have a unique biology and it allows them to co-exist w...

In bracken cave, in north america, over the last decade and a half, bat populations have been plummeting, all because of an outbreak theyve been fighting of a disease called white nose syndrome. >> its a cold-loving fungus that grows on the bat when the bats are hibernating in the wintertime. and unfortunately, this has affected something on the order of a dozen different species of north american bats. in some cases populations have declined over 90%. >> really? thats huge. >> its huge. yes. it...

Some bats eat insects, others fruit or even fish and frogs. these species, some of them are living right next on each other. >> absolutely. one square mile of rain forest in for instance the brazilian amazon could have 100 species of bat. >> the smallest bat in the world, it is this tiny thing in thailand that weighs less than a penny. and the biggest bat in the world has more than a six-foot wing span. there is a bat that lives in the cloud forests of ecuador that has the longest tongue of any ...

Wearing a mask, washing your hands. sacrifice those things now. you have the power to protect the ones you love. - [narrator] as many of the nations most trusted hospitals, we all know this. the science has not changed. masks slow the spread of covid-19. every one of our healthcare professionals is asking you to do one very simple thing. lets keep it up. lets mask up. (solemn orchestral music ends) in north america alone there are 46 different species of

One of the big problems in europe and the u.s. used to be wild rabid dogs. >> ancient, you know, medical experts developed a lot of odd ideas about how you would cure rabies. they used to believe that one way to stop rabies from killing you was to take a hair from the tail of the rabid dog and insert it into the bite wound, and this is the origin of the phrase "hair of the dog" which we talk about in the context of hangover treatment. >> then along came louis pasteur in the mid 19th century. hed...