Reuters World News - The Bat Lands: a compendium

Episode Date: May 21, 2023

This episode is a special companion to the five-part investigation into how humanity's hunger for resources is driving worldwide destruction of areas rich with bats, carriers of tens of thousands of viruses. A Reuters data analysis pinpoints areas where conditions are ripe for a bat-borne disease to spill over to humanity, and how those spillovers could lead to the next global pandemic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, as the world faces a post-pandemic reality, we're taking you around the world to understand how deadly viruses jump from bats to humans. A team of Reuters journalists are looking ahead to the next possible global health emergency and how our ever-growing need for mining, agriculture and housing is putting us and bats at more risk. This is Reuters World News, bringing you everything you need to know from the first. front lines in 10 minutes. I'm Kim Vinal in London. Many of us have settled into a new normal in the years since the COVID-19 pandemic upended every aspect of life. But scientists and researchers are scrambling to get ahead of a possible future outbreak. Our reporter Deb Nelson explains how the next pandemic could be around the corner. It all starts with bats. They are crucial to the global ecosystem and in many local economies because they pollinate flowers, scatter seeds,

eat insects, but they also harbor tens of thousands of viruses. For millennia, they and their viruses weren't a danger to anybody. But in the last century, we're cutting down trees to dig mines, to raise crops, to harvest timber. That disrupts the bats, and it brings them into closer contact with people. Then some of these viruses can make the leap, the humans. It's how pandemics can start. And it's what keeps scientists up at night. Even though they are relatively rare events, we're talking about highly deadly pathogens that the World Health Organization says, under the right circumstances, could set off an outbreak that kills thousands, even millions. I mentioned this to Ryan McNeil, an amazing data journalist here at Reuters. He thought we might be

able to use data to determine where around the world spillovers are occurring. First, we needed to map these places, and we were then able to learn about the conditions that existed at the time of those spellovers. We could then use those very same environmental variables to identify areas that were similar to those past spillovers. We were then able to identify the areas that were the most high risk. And we were, we were, called those jump zones. So we sit out to identify the places on earth where spillovers are the most likely to happen. We found about 1.8 billion people live in those areas. And the risky areas are expanding in some really densely populated areas like India. I talked to a man in Kerala who lost

two brothers, his father, and other family members to Nipa. They think one of the brothers may have inadvertently eaten fruit that had been contaminated by bat saliva. NEPA is a virus carried by flying foxes. They're huge bats with dog faces. They shed the virus as they fly, eat fruit, and drop it on the ground. The first known cases came from pigs who had eaten bat-contaminated fruit in Malaysia. And Bina George, the Kerala Health Minister, told me just how dangerous an infection can be. The fatality rate in Nica is very high.

It's from 70 to 100 percent. And the transmission rate from human to human, it's also very high. It's multiple times more than COVID. So these things are also happening in West Africa, developing areas that are rich in natural resources. And those resources often are heavily exploited by governments and people to raise living standards and companies to raise profits. They're mining gold and iron ore and bauxite and growing cocoa

and harvesting timber to grow economically. But that very activity disrupts bats and incredibly deadly viruses like Ebola and Marburg are cropping up in places they've never appeared before. We had a finance minister in Liberia tell us that talking about disease risk assessments scares away investors. Meanwhile, there have been seven new outbreaks

of Ebola and Marburg in West Africa since 2020. So today, these viruses represent biological minefield in 113 countries, every continent except Antarctica. Scientists fear that it's just a matter of time before one sets off the next pandemic. It's only a matter of time. That is a frightening prospect. The Reuters team spoke to researchers around the globe

who've been ringing the alarm bells about bat-borne viruses long before the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2007, 2008, we detected the first time Zaree Ebola virus was in West Africa. And people thought it was not true. We reported marble antibodies in bats. And people just take it as usual. That's Dr. Richard Sue Eyre, a bat researcher at the University of Ghana.

So my advice is for us to wake up and listen to scientists. And then start putting measures in place to prevent diseases. But a lot needs to happen in order for us to get ahead of the next possible outbreak. Researchers have begun identifying where spillover viruses might cross paths with big populations, a dangerous combination. One of the hotspots is a northern Laos. Scientists found more than two dozen different coronaviruses and bats living in caves there after the 2020 outbreak.

These caves were once in a pretty isolated region, but it's now close to a stop on a new high-speed railway built by China that could whisk people and viruses. into a major city within hours. The train is expected to bring more development and more tourists into this danger zone. That has made the corridor one of the highest risk places in the world for a bat virus to spill over.

10,000 miles away, researchers are trying to get ahead of rapid deforestation in the Amazon to understand the risk of bat-borne viruses before it's too late. The Amazon is the great unknown. Research has barely made a dent on documenting the bats or their viruses.

And they suspect there may have been outbreaks that went undetected, maybe swept through native tribes at some point, but died out. These Brazilian risky areas have grown two and a half times faster than any place else in the world. So researchers are going out, taking samples from bats to better understand how and whether viruses are evolving into threats. We spoke to Ledmila Aguayar, a biologist at the University of Brasilia. She said it's very sad to know that we have great potential to discover and prevent new epidemics.

Nobody is thinking about it. On the contrary, we are currently having a very large investment in dismantling the environment. But research is only one element needed to prevent the next possible pandemic. Helen Reid was part of the Reuters investigation with Deb. She says the scientific community has laid out what's needed. So first of all, governments in all the countries that we visited, like Liberia, India, China, Laos and Brazil, need to really acknowledge the risks.

And then we need to make a plan to be able to assess those risks when we're considering mining projects, agriculture, construction and infrastructure. And the great thing is that the tools actually, already exist. There's a thing called a health impact assessment, which is basically how a project will change public health outcomes. Another is just better disease surveillance. And all of these solutions really cost money. The developing world is where most of the risk is and most of the resources sit in the developed world. So there's a pandemic fund that has actually been created, but there's actually an ongoing debate within that fund over how much of that money,

should go towards preparedness, things like vaccine research and vaccine rollout and distribution, versus how much should go towards prevention of pandemics, thinking about how to make sure that humans and wildlife are not coming into greater contact. So that is the big divide at the moment. At the end of the day, there is consensus in the scientific community about what needs to be done. We talked to 100 researchers studying and working in jump zones around the world. And from Brazil to Australia to West Africa and Southeast Asia, they told us humanity cannot afford to keep ravaging bad habitats. I'm Deb Nelson. I'm Ryan McNeill.

I'm Helen Reed, reporting for Reuters. That's it for this special edition of Reuters World News. We'll be back tomorrow. Deb, Helen, Ryan, and more than a dozen other reports, reporters, photographers and editors worked on this massive investigation. To read more and see stunning images of bats and communities around the world, go to Reuters.com. And to get all our shows in your podcast feed,

make sure to follow us on your favourite platform or download the Reuters app.