Humans are creating hot spots where bats could transmit zoonotic diseases
By Jillian Kramer
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As human settlements creep ever closer to wildlife habitat, replacing swaths of forests with development and farmland, scientists fear those land-use changes could spur the evolution of zoonotic diseases such as COVID-19. Areas that have seen dramatic transformations and are home to large bat populations, some scientists believe, could prove to be the starting point of the next coronavirus pandemic.
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Using their hot-spot criteria, the researchers analyzed more than 28.5 million square kilometers of land densely populated by Asian horseshoe bats, which live in tropical and temperate regions and are named for their large, lance-shaped noses. In total, the researchers studied more than 10,000 locations.
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“The scary thing about these zoonotic viruses is that the spillover process is happening all the time,” says Wood. But the most dangerous and surveilled viruses are those that can be spread from human to human—a process that is “not an easy feat for a virus” that is used to being passed between bats and other mammals, she says. “COVID-19 is a great example.”
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