Ebola: research team says migrating fruit bats responsible for outbreak

Ebola: research team says migrating fruit bats responsible for outbreak

The largest-ever outbreak of Ebola was triggered by a toddler's chance contact with a single infected bat, a team of international researchers will reveal, after a major investigation of the origins of the deadly disease now ravaging Guinea, Liberia, Ivory Coast and Nigeria.

A group of 17 European and African tropical disease researchers, ecologists and anthropologists spent three weeks talking to people and capturing bats and other animals near the village of Meliandoua in remote eastern Guinea, where the present epidemic appeared in December 2013. They have concluded that the disease was spread by colonies of migratory fruit bats. Their research is expected to be published in a major journal in the next few weeks.

This was suspected as the case for some time. Looks like they're confirming it.

a reply to: loam

Fruit bats? I find that hard to believe. Reservoir species are normally rarely contacted, yet mega bats are broadly researched by humans. If Ebola's main reservoir were fruit bats, I'd expect to see recurrent cases on an annual basis, yet really, we only have an outbreak every decade or so. Fruit bats can contract the disease, but are we sure it isn't a dead end species like humanity? Pass it on to ferrets. If one ferret becomes ill, does that mean that pet stores become the culprit?

If you could get it from the droppings or pee then I can believe that as toddlers get everywhere and put their hands in everything and hands in their mouths etc. Mine was chewing on the steps of a park slide yesterday.....>_

a reply to: loam

How do they get it? I mean.. do they all have it? Is it more likely an insect that feeds on their blood when they roost in caves? Something they eat?

a reply to: Nechash

Well they believed bats in a (i believe it was Kittum) cave was responsible for a while were the reservoir.

I'm laying it down right now. It is a parasite that is feeding on bats as they sleep that is infecting them, then their droppings spread it.

originally posted by: LadyTrick
If you could get it from the droppings or pee then I can believe that as toddlers get everywhere and put their hands in everything and hands in their mouths etc. Mine was chewing on the steps of a park slide yesterday.....>_

have you checked out Soficows threads?

plenty of info about hendra (bats) virus that is zoonotic and is spread from bats.

even now in some council areas if a dead bat is found, they tell people not to handle it and call them. They call the epa or get someone all spec'd up for removal.

The idea of Ebola being a human-made virus, such as HIV is highly plausible as it's not clear where does the virus originate.

The only real way to determine if the fruit bat is indeed the host species, the only way would be to catch, and test the blood. If the virus is in their blood, it will be what the cause is, and the cure. However, from what I have seen and read, they have tested the bats, and have yet to find any evidence of such. The host species, still remains elusive and right now is only suspected, now they have to go the extra mile and confirm it beyond a shadow of a doubt.

It has been known for a while that fruit bats are hosts to ebola though they don't show the symptoms.

In many places in Africa they eat 'bushmeat' such as monkeys, rats, and in some places such as Sierra Leone, fruit bats are something they consider a delicacy.

There are people trying to teach the people of Africa about such risks but they say they won't give up their 'traditions'.

www.theguardian.com...

Ebola risk unheeded as Guinea's villagers keep on eating fruit bats
Health workers struggle to separate myth from reality of Ebola as residents say abandoning tradition is out of the question

www.newsweek.com...

Smuggled Bushmeat Is Ebola's Back Door to America

Under U.S. Department of Agriculture rules, not a single African country is allowed to import any meat product, raw or processed. And for years now, U.S. health officials and legislators have been expressing concern over the steady flow of bushmeat illegally imported into the country. Internal documents show that from 2009 to 2013, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency confiscated over 69,000 different bushmeat items, with seizures ranging from dried bat to smoked monkey (see sidebar). And that’s likely a mere sliver compared with what actually gets into the U.S. At least one estimate puts the number at 15,000 pounds every month.

“Nobody knows” how much of the stuff gets into America, says Allard Blom of the World Wildlife Fund. “It’s anybody’s guess, really, because there’s very little control on the import of bushmeats. You’re looking here particularly at Fish and Wildlife Service [FWS], and they have very few agents that are working at these airports, and very few pieces of luggage are actually screened.”

www.washingtonpost.com...

To the foreign eye, it looks like a flattened, blackened lump of unidentifiable animal parts. To many Africans, however, bush meat — the cooked, dried or smoked remains of a host of wild animals, from rats and bats to monkeys — is not only the food of their forefathers, it is life-sustaining protein where nutrition is scarce.

And as it has been during past Ebola outbreaks, bush meat is once again suspected to have been the bridge that caused the deadly disease to go from the animal world to the human one. All it takes is a single transmission event from animal to human — handling an uncooked bat with the virus, for example — to create an epidemic. Human-to-human contact then becomes the primary source of infection.

So, it shall now be referred to as Bat# Flu?

a reply to: loam

Sure. Blame the bushmeat and "civilize" those poor Africans - because factory farmed chicken, beef and pork are just so superior. Not.



Just like bird flu was played to kill the mom and pop backyard poultry business in Asia - for corporate takeover - Ebola's getting played in Africa for the same agenda. Yes, wild birds carry bird flu. Yes, bats and other animals carry Ebola. BUT...

It's our worldview that's the problem...

not our world.

The WHO and other reputable scientific establishments have done lots of research as to the origins of pathogens and viruses.

The west and science aren't the issue. Ignorance, lack of knowledge and unwillingness to adapt in certain lands like Africa and China are the issue.

Calling it a 'western conspiracy' is ignorance and really isn't doing anything for awareness which is essential in prevention of such diseases.

SARS from China due to bats infecting civet cats which were eaten, they were all stored together in cages. AIDS from Africa from an infected monkey that was eaten. Ebola from Africa from infected bats that were eaten.

If people in Africa and China won't stop such habits like they should, they should be effectively quarantined. No exports. No air travel. Let them wipes themselves out if they want.

Potential global wipe out scenarios because of the ignorance of a few nations is stupid and the west should be realising and acting on this now. We have standards and we should ensure our food chain is contaminant free.

www.newsweek.com...

In a 2012 study, researchers working with government officials at John F. Kennedy Airport in the borough of Queens, New York (and some smaller airports) tested confiscated bushmeat, including baboon, chimpanzee, mangabey, guenon, green monkey and cane rat. They found that the meat does not arrive alone; it carries with it many unseen microorganisms.

Smoked bushmeat may appear safe, but the flesh inside is still juicy—filled with blood, fresh tissue and more: Simian foamy virus and herpes viruses showed up in the samples of the confiscated meats. The researchers didn’t find Ebola, but they tested only a few samples.

Cooking meat thoroughly will generally kill all pathogens, including viruses and bacteria, but most of the bushmeat arriving in the U.S. has been just barely processed in order to keep it from rotting while being transported. “If you wanted to safely transport meat and not worry about pathogens, you wouldn’t smoke it,” says Amato. “It’s not a very efficient way of killing microorganisms.”

In addition, bushmeat may serve as a potential route for other diseases, “especially some of the livestock diseases, [like] hoof-and-mouth and African swine fever. Those can survive a very long time in a piece of meat,” says Bill Karesh, one of the authors of the 2012 study and a public health policy expert at EcoHealth Alliance. These and other pathogens could present dangers equally—or more—frightening than an Ebola outbreak.

In a 2007 report, the World Health Organization warned that infectious diseases are now emerging at a rapid and previously unseen rate. New viruses and bacteria keep appearing, while familiar pathogens, previously thought to have been suppressed, reemerge.

These old viruses and bacteria either change genetically, re-combine with other pathogens or adapt in a way that fools our immune systems, becoming newly empowered to ruin our bodies. Such was the case with the swine and bird flu outbreaks of the past decade.

Nearly 75 percent of these emerging infectious diseases come from animal species, and of those, the majority were in the wild. Better prediction and prevention of these emerging diseases requires closer monitoring of individuals who have a lot of contact with bushmeat to look for what Dr. Amesh Adalja, of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center’s Center for Health Security, calls viral chatter.

Viral chatter, he explains, occurs when viruses jump from wild animals into people. Though it may feel as if viruses attack humans en masse in one big offensive, what’s really happening is a series of ongoing, tentative incursions. During these incursions, the viruses can mutate, becoming more easily transmitted, more deadly or both. Not every new virus we see in humans will cause sickness or symptoms, but by monitoring viral chatter, we could potentially uncover trends that might help prevent the spread of future viruses that do cause sickness, or worse.

If scientists had been monitoring viral chatter in the past, one tragic public health story may have developed quite differently. Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) almost certainly was transferred from bushmeat. “We have an awful lot of evidence [that] this virus moved from chimpanzees to people,” says Amato. “The most likely way that move happened was because people ate chimpanzees.”

Epidemiologists believe that HIV is a descendent of simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), which is found in primates like the sooty mangabey, which is indigenous—and hunted—in Western Africa. The virus likely began to infect humans first as SIV, then slowly gained the mutations that led, ultimately, to the shift to HIV.

“If people were monitoring these bushmeat hunters in Cameroon in the early 1900s, you might have seen SIV jumping into them before it became HIV,” Adalja says.

Such global viral forecasting is even more important today. With people traveling far and wide—and bushmeat reaching certain regions of the globe for the first time—more opportunities exist for the spread of viral diseases.

“The perfect example is China, where they’re harvesting lots of wildlife of all kinds, they’re storing it all on top of each other in warehouses and markets,” says Amato. “You’re sort of creating this very strange evolutionary environment where pathogens and other microorganisms that never would come into contact with each other are coming into contact with each other.”

These environments can encourage what’s called horizontal gene transfer, where genes from one virus move into another virus when they are infecting the same organism.

In the most frightening type of horizontal gene transfer, a robust but harmless virus could transfer its genetic propensity for resilience to a deadly but fragile virus, creating some new supervirus that might lead to a SARS-like epidemic.

It’s no coincidence that the 2002-2003 SARS outbreak was born in the live animal markets of southern China; the virus originated in bats, where it would have stayed permanently, except for the fact that in the markets infected bats were kept in cages near civets (a small cat-like mammal).

Humans didn’t eat the bats, but they did eat the civets. And at some point the disease moved from bat to civet to human, acquiring mutations along the way that enabled it to infect over 8,000 people in 37 different countries.

originally posted by: soficrow
a reply to: loam

Sure. Blame the bushmeat and "civilize" those poor Africans - because factory farmed chicken, beef and pork are just so superior. Not.

Just like bird flu was played to kill the mom and pop backyard poultry business in Asia - for corporate takeover - Ebola's getting played in Africa for the same agenda.

For the most part, utter nonsense in this case.

It's a food preparation issue. Identifying a possible agenda or conspiracy by some should not be used to thwart EVERY recommendation to change certain habits that promote public health.

“

"We are not suggesting that people stop hunting altogether, which isn’t realistic,” said FAO Chief Veterinary Officer Juan Lubroth. “But communities need clear advice on the need not to touch dead animals or to sell or eat the meat of any animal that they find already dead. They should also avoid hunting animals that are sick or behaving strangely, as this is another red flag.”

Fruit bats – usually eaten dried or in a spicy soup – are thought to be the most likely reservoir species for the virus, which they can carry without developing clinical signs of the disease, and should be avoided altogether, according to FAO.

“The virus is killed when meat is cooked at a high temperature or heavily smoked, but anyone who handles, skins or butchers an infected wild animal is at risk of contracting the virus,” Lubroth said.

FAO warns of fruit bat risk in West African Ebola epidemic

a reply to: Necrose

First of all, HIV is a retrovirus, and the first retrovirus I know of that is lethal. For a human to have designed it back when it emerged, they would have had to have been 50 years ahead in their genetic technology over everyone else on the planet. They would have needed genetic sequencers and the ability to build RNA perfectly one amino acid at a time. Not to mention, the best people have come up with today in practice is either a recombinant virus which is almost identical to naturally occurring ones, or a viral delivery vehicle which has its DNA/RNA package altered. They have never, ever built a virus from the ground up yet. Finally, SIV exists in primates and is broadly spread enough that we can assume it preexisted HIV in humans. They would have had no reason to humanize SIV, because SIV is not lethal to its carriers. HIV is an abberation, and I am 99.99% certain it is entirely naturally occurring. Now, it may have been altered and optimized later on after it emerged naturally. I can't speak to that, but I can almost assure you that it is not engineered by man.

a reply to: loam

It's not a conspiracy, just a long term business plan. From your source:

...FAO will help to assess the role of hunting in livelihoods with a view to finding healthier and more sustainable long-term livestock production alternatives to provide people with additional protein and income.

Again...

It's our worldview that's the problem,

not our world.

PS. Which particular Ebola strain and clade/subclade are these migrating fruit bats carrying?

a reply to: soficrow

So we shouldn't tell them to cook their meat?

originally posted by: loam
a reply to: soficrow

So we shouldn't tell them to cook their meat?

Definitely not. Way too patronizing. Also condescending and down right uppity. They already cook their meat. So do the cordon bleu chefs who prepare those $10-100,000 a plate bushmeat dinners. [The price goes up depending on whether the species is going extinct, "vulnerable," or just "Near Threatened." fyi - The Straw-coloured fruit bats in question are "Near Threatened."]

Straw-coloured fruit bats are a migratory species that live in colonies thousands or even millions strong on the edges of forests, towns and cities. Their range encompasses the tropical belt of Africa, and populations exist from Sudan south to Zambia. The species even reaches Nigeria and the Ivory Coast (well, their hotel menus at least…).

Eidolon helvum (African Straw-coloured Fruit-bat, Pale Xantharpy, Staw-coloured Flying Fox, Straw-coloured Fruit Bat)

…..Listed as Near Threatened because this species is in significant decline