(Image: Wikimedia Commons)
Despite their fame, scientists don’t really understand the viral infections of bats to consider them the main source of zoonoses (diseases transmitted from animals to humans).
A study published in the journal Science, summarized the available information on this topic. Factors like their behavior (ability to fly, social relations, etc), their pregnancy and their immune system, may play a role in their propensity to carry certain types of viruses (like the SARS-Cov 2).
However, if we consider only the cases that are important for the natural cycles of infection transmission, then the number of zoonoses for which bats are responsible turns out to be proportional to the number of their species.
That means, bats are hardly evolutionarily predisposed to transmit infections to humans. It's just the number of their species is very large, which provides a high variety of viruses.
This study may help us to understand how diseases from the flying mammals are transmited and evetually tackle them.
If you have any questions, lemme know ;)
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