Page 15 - Vampire Bat News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

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 and 800 deaths. >> that same year, the chinese government approved the construction of the level four ...

2019, that's 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? >> well, 96% is a different virus. so it's a bit like the difference between us and chimpanzees. it's a d...

That's one of the issues with these wet markets. for bats, they have coronaviruses that they've adapted to and they're 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-19, as of now, no one can say for sure how it ended up in people. >> all the evidence we have sugg...

>> when the wing is around the face like that, they're using their wings as built-in blanket. >> d'angeli is part of a larger movement that's been taking place for the last three decades in the united states, teaching people why these creatures should be protected, not feared. >> we're all here for one purpose and for one target, one direction. and that's to help these animals and to help people understand why these animals need our assistan assistance. they're so much like us. they are different-looking, different colors, different sizes, different shapes, different importances, different job...

>> 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. >> that's how the disease stops. >> but bats' immune systems don't respond the same way as humans. >> it seems that bats are able to mount robust immune responses but not experience ...