The Bat-Virus Détente
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for AzumaHazuki:
Bats have become newly infamous as reservoirs of deadly viruses. In addition to hosting an ancestral version of the MERS virus, which has caused repeated outbreaks in people, bats also harbor very close relatives of the ones that caused the 2003 SARS outbreak and today's COVID-19 pandemic. They are natural hosts for Hendra, Nipah and Marburg viruses-all of which can be deadly in people-and they are the suspected reservoir of the Ebola virus that has killed thousands in multiple outbreaks in Africa.
Bats can also host a diverse range of influenza viruses as well as relatives of the human-infecting hepatitis C virus. And research suggests that some viruses that today infect only people, like measles and mumps, had their evolutionary origins in bats.
Yet despite the long list of bat-dwelling viruses, the animals don't seem to be bothered by their many invisible inhabitants. And scientists want to know why. Today, a growing number of them suspect that the key lies in special features of the bat immune system-ones that spark responses to viral invasion that are very different from what goes on in people. "It's very intriguing," Banerjee says. "I wake up thinking about it every day. Why do bats have this immune response that's so different from ours and so different from other mammals?"
[...] "Rather than trying to reinvent the wheel, we could learn from what evolution has developed in a bat, where the outcome is not disease but it's something that enables survival upon infection with a particular virus," says cellular immunologist Judith Mandl of McGill University in Montreal. "If we figure that out, then maybe we can apply the same principles and modulate the immune response in humans."
Journal Reference:
Janelle S. Ayres and David S. SchneiderTolerance of Infections, (DOI: 10.1146/annurev-immunol-020711-075030)
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