Just about everybody knows the COVID-19 pandemic started spreading from a wildlife meat market in China.
Lots of people know it has been traced to a virus that jumped from bats to humans.
Not nearly as many know that Montana has been a world leader in researching those catastrophic diseases.
And now those researchers warn that the ways people manage the remaining wild landscape could cause even deadlier outbreaks than the one weâre enduring now.
âMontana is also home to one of the few international research centers on global infectious diseases that originate in bats,â said Raina Plowright, an associate professor of microbiology at Montana State University. âBetween MSU and Rocky Mountain Labs, we have one of the largest groups working on bats in the world. And the pathogens we mostly focus on can be more fatal than coronavirus.â