2023-05-19 13:10:50
The next deadly virus spreading around the world could easily come from a bat roosting in or around the caves explored by Thiago Bernardi Vieira.
Vieira, a biologist from Brazil’s Federal University of Para, is the recipient of research grants, including one titled “The Lesser-Known Bat Species in Brazil.” His mission: to collect basic information about bats here in the Amazon rainforest.
He has his work cut out for him.
The scale of the drudgery he faces was easy to see during a July 2021 foray into the giant cavern of Planaltina, where he sought to catch samples of the many species thought to live there. Vieira shone her headlamp on a bat with a long, sharp nose.
“I’ve never caught one here before,” the scientist said, gently untangling the animal from a net he had stretched across the mouth of the cave.
Deep in the world’s largest rainforest, what science knows about wildlife is as limited as the jungle is vast. Beyond Planaltina, one of the best-known caves in the Amazon, countless other habitats – and bat species native to them – remain completely unstudied or undiscovered. And with limited funding available to researchers, scientists don’t expect to unlock the mysteries of the Amazon anytime soon.
“We don’t know anything,” said Vieira, whose minimal budget for her “lesser-known species” project was about $3,000. He recently won a second grant, totaling just over $21,000, to continue his research.
Some of the most devastating viruses that have infected humans over the past century have emerged from bats. For reasons such as their numbers and diversity, animals are an important reservoir of pathogens that can make people sick. And due to the vast expanse of the Amazon rainforest and rapid human encroachment on its little-known habitats, some scientists see Brazil as the likely birthplace of a future pandemic. “The potential for new viruses is enormous,” said Erika Hingst-Zaher, a zoologist at Instituto Butantan, a leading research center in Sao Paulo, and a member of PREVIR, a national network of scientists documenting pathogens carried. by bats and other animals. . “People are betting that the next pandemic will come from Brazil. »
Brazil’s health ministry, in a statement to Archyde.com, said there was currently no evidence that the risk of a new virus emerging from wild animals represents “a public health emergency of national importance”. .
Home to the third most bat species on the planet according to an authoritative tally, Brazil has seen its chances of giving birth to an unknown virus skyrocket as people clear more and more of the rainforest. to make way for logging camps, mines, ranches and settlements.
If a never-before-seen pathogen – even more contagious than the one that causes COVID-19 – were to escape from the Brazilian Amazon, according to a Archyde.com simulation, it could infect 1.2 billion people in six months. That’s exponentially more people than the 10.5 million who caught COVID-19 in the first six months of the pandemic.
Brazil has more high-risk areas than any other country, Archyde.com found – 1.5 million square kilometers of land with ideal conditions for zoonotic spillover as virus jumps from animals to humans are known. For its analysis, Archyde.com looked at the environmental conditions around 95 places around the world where bat viruses infected humans between 2002 and 2020. The news agency then used a computer model to estimate where similar conditions existed in the world for each year during the period and identified the areas most prone to overflows. – nicknamed “jump zones”.
In Brazil, the analysis identified risk areas covering a combined area approximately three times the size of France. Driven by conditions such as deforestation and other human incursions into bat habitats, these Brazilian jumping zones have grown by more than 40% in the past two decades – more than 2.5 times faster than similar risk areas around the world, Archyde.com found.
Nearly three-quarters of Brazil’s jump zones are in the Amazon, a tangle of biodiversity that holds more secrets than scientists can ever hope to uncover, especially with swaths of rainforest rapidly succumbing to development. With each new incursion into the jungle, the possibility for a deadly new pathogen to spread, proliferate locally and potentially spread to the rest of Brazil and the world increases.
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