The United States federal government has held off all bat research nationwide during the COVID-19 pandemic. The government had sent emails to all researchers working on projects involving bats in the country, due to fears that humans could pass the virus to bats.

The US Fish and Wildlife Service officials fear that if the virus were to be caught on by North American bat species, it would cause a 'spillback' effect that would put all human effort to fight the coronavirus to waste.

Coincidingly, bats are also known to carry other strains of coronaviruses. A temporary stop in handling bats could suppress triggering a new wave of infection that could be beyond our capacity to control as the battle against COVID-19 is still on the run.

In recent news, the coronavirus has shown its ability to be passed from humans to animals. Dogs, cats, bunnies, and most recently, a Malayan tiger at the Bronx Zoo all caught the virus, possibly from caretakers or other humans with close proximity to them.

Bats and Coronaviruses

Although the exact origin of Sars-Cov-2 remains to be unclear, many believe that it started from bats in China and then passed on to pangolins, who could have been responsible for transferring the virus to humans.

Before the coronavirus we currently face came to be, bats have already been notorious for being carriers of other strains of viruses. Undeterred by this, their immune systems have adapted to tolerate the viruses without any foul effect.

However, a recent disease outbreak in bats has been found to affect US bat populations. The disease called the white-nose syndrome has killed more than 5.5million bats since 2006. Government officials are concerned that the white-nose syndrome might have weakened US bat populations and might left them more vulnerable to the newest form of coronavirus.

Biologists discussed a better approach on how to handle bat research and how they might aid in understanding Sars-Cov-2 better. However, with the recent ban, it could be hard to push through with it.

Kevin Olival of the EcoHealth Alliance expresses regret about the risk of handling bats for a long time to come. 'There's a human health goal down the line. But the intermediate goal is that we don't infect other species that we come in contact with,' he adds.

Leave the Wildlife Alone

The new coronavirus, which has crossed the globe, has infected more than one million people. Its origin, like so many outbreaks in the past, is from an animal.

Scientists believe that Sars-Cov-2 originated from bats, just like Ebola, SARS, and MERS. HIV drifted off to humans from chimpanzees, while Influenza A transferred from wild birds to pigs, a finally made their way to people. The Washington Post claims that the problem does not lie in the animals as the viruses have been long-running through their systems. The real problem is with us humans, who continue to exploit them.

Peter Daszak, the president of EcoHealth Alliance, said that the rise of pandemics is not a 'random act of God', but is a cause of what people do to the environment. He says that we need to start connecting the dots and find better ways of doing things so as not to add to the pile of diseases sweeping our population away.

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