Why is bat the culprit of many global pandemics?

According to scientists, the origin of Wuhan Corona virus may come from a snake. However, other infectious disease experts say the culprit is likely the bat.

According to CNN news, Dr. Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, an environmental non-profit organization, said: "When you look at the genetic sequence of the virus and combine it with Corona viruses. As we know, we see the closest relative of this virus is the bat . "

Bats have long been considered a "biological superhuman".

Professor Guizhen Wu of the China Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also said in a study published by the Lancet medical journal, the data they have so far showed that the new Corona virus originated from the bat.

The winged mammal is the reservoir of some deadly viruses such as Marburg, Nipah and Hendra, viruses that cause disease in humans and cause outbreaks in Uganda, Malaysia, Bangladesh and Australia. Bats are thought to be the natural host of Ebola virus, rabies, SARS and MERS.The two types of Corona virus that cause SARS and MERS are similar to the new corona viruses in Wuhan.

Usually, there is an intermediary that spreads the virus from bats to humans - such as the 2003 SARS case of civet cats - and the MERS that appeared in the 2000s as camels .

Scientists call these viruses zoonotic because they are transmitted from animals to humans.

In the case of the Nipah virus , which causes a range of symptoms including fatal encephalitis (encephalitis), the infection process begins with juice made from palm tree sap that has been hit by urine or bat saliva. Bats perched on tree branches and dropped their urine and saliva in plastic containers that people prepared to collect delicious sap.

Officials are checking a well in Changaroth, in the Indian state of Kerala, on May 21, 2018, during the Nipah virus outbreak mainly caused by people eating the fruit they had eaten.

The fact that the new Corona virus is associated with bats is "not surprising for virologists who have studied bat-derived viruses," said Dr. Stathis Giotis, a virologist at the Department of Infectious Diseases at the University. Royal London said. "Bats are the source of many emerging and recurrent viruses for other animals."

Giotis said it is likely that Chinese horseshoe bats , a common bat species in China, are responsible for the new Corona virus in Wuhan today.

Why are bats so good at harboring and spreading the virus?

Bats are a diverse group of animals, with over 1,300 species. They are geographically diverse, living on every continent except Antarctica. Compared to terrestrial animals, they have a longer life span and live in the densities of millions of burrows, meaning they are more likely to be exposed to viruses and viruses that are easily circulating in the species.

Although bats contain a number of dangerous viruses, they do not seem to suffer the consequences of these viruses - except rabies.

One theory is that flying bats, no other mammals can fly like bats, have allowed bats to evolve mechanisms to protect them from viruses. Flying increases the metabolism and body temperature of bats similar to fever in humans and other mammals. According to scientists, this, on an evolutionary scale, could strengthen the bat's immune system and make it more adaptable to viruses.

"The current hypothesis of scientists is that the bat's immune system has been adapted over centuries of evolution due to their ability to fly," Giotis said.

Scientists have found some promising clues in the animal's genetic structure, to explain why they have a typical immune response to the virus.

Of course, bats are not the only animals that carry the germs. The plague is caused by rodents and HIV comes from chimpanzees.

A cave in South Africa, where bats often live in groups of millions

However, in a 2017 article, scientists discovered bats contain viruses more dangerous than other species. A team of scientists including Daszak looked at 188 pathogenic viruses and found that bats had a "significantly higher" rate of this virus than other mammals.

Deforestation and urbanization, especially in densely populated places like China, are putting people in close contact with bats and other animals, which makes it easy to spread the virus from bats to humans.

Is Wuhan virus coming from bats?

Scientists in China have been actively working on bats, arguing that bats have long been thought to be the starting point of the next pandemic.

In an article published last year, scientists from the Wuhan Institute of Virology made a profound comment: "It is often believed that the bat nCoV virus (new Corona virus) will reappear and cause an outbreak. In this regard, China is likely to become an epidemic hot spot.The challenge is to predict when and where the disease will occur, so that we can try our best to prevent the such an outbreak ".

Daszak said that scientists have found about 50 types of SARS-associated Corona virus in bats throughout China and the SARS corona virus has been found in people in Yunnan province, near the caves where they were found. viruses in bats - although they show no symptoms of respiratory disease during sampling.

"These viruses are at high risk of causing a pandemic. They are in bats, they are in Southeast Asia, people are constantly exposed to them and they are really infected , " Mr. Daszak said.

It is still too early to conclude whether Wuhan Corona virus originated from bats and whether there is another intermediary. The outbreak originally originated from a seafood market selling live animals in Wuhan and scientists trying to trace the source of the virus, both in the laboratory and in the field.

According to the China Centers for Disease Control, the data shows that the virus travels from bat to another wildlife, then to humans. No bats were sold or found at the seafood market and the disease was first reported in late December when most of the bats in Wuhan were hibernating.

All research surrounding this new outbreak has just begun, so there will be many speculations about the origin of the virus.

• The incubation period of corona virus is 5.2 days
• China suddenly announced that not everyone infected with the Corona virus had signs of fever
• The corona virus spread to 20 countries and territories