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Meet the Philippines' 'virus hunters', studying bats to prevent future pandemics

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Published on 23 Mar 2021 / In News and Politics

Source:- newzee



It's the middle of the night in and a team of researchers wearing personal protective equipment work to extract a bat from a net, swabbing it, measuring its size, and documenting all the data in the Philippines' Laguna province, on the main island of Luzon.

Working with a team that calls itself the "virus hunters", bat ecologist Phillip Alviola has studied bats and how their viruses can affect humans for nearly a decade, and the general nature of bats much longer - for 24 years.

Since 2007, the virus hunters have caught thousands of bats in the Philippines for analysis and detected new viruses from them, including coronaviruses, hantaviruses, henipaviruses and poxviruses, all with the help of other scientists from Japan.

Their latest project involves performing a risk factor analysis by developing a simulation model that can predict the dynamics of coronavirus in bats by analysing specific factors like time, climate, season, temperature and its effects on viral transmissions and transmissibility to humans.

"What we're trying to look into are other strains of coronavirus that have the potential to jump to humans," said Alviola.

The team ventures out into forests and caves where bats are known to roost and sets traps before sunset. They take saliva and feacal samples for analysis before releasing the bats back into the wild. Some that need further study are caught and preserved.

Alviola knows there are disease risks involved in studying bats, but said he is not deterred.

"If we know the virus itself and we know where it came from, we know how to isolate that virus geographically," he said.

Although no direct relations have yet been made, the World Health Organisation has been studying if the SARS-Cov2 originated from bats due to its similar viral makeup.

Alviola keeps the prevention of future outbreaks top of mind.

"I think our project has this amazing promise of possibly avoiding the next pandemic by determining where, or possibly when, the next pandemic will occur," he said.

According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, bats are a group of mammals with more than 1,200 different species. In the Philippines, there are over 78 species of bats, some of them endemic to the country, according to a 2020 report by the Philippines Department of Environment and Natural Resources.

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