
Bat cave solves mystery of SARS virus - nature24
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-07766-9
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jxramos
"...the researchers spent five years monitoring the bats that lived there,
collecting fresh guano and taking anal swabs."

That my friends is dedication. Would make a great dirty jobs episode. Best
wishes for their work to save some lives and prevent a future wider outbreak
from occurring.

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navls
The very first episode had similar charm
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1272617/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1272617/)

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jxramos
"""Although many markets selling animals in China have already been closed or
restricted following outbreaks of SARS and other infectious diseases, Yuen
agrees that the latest results suggest the risk is still present. “It
reinforces the notion that we should not disturb wildlife habitats and never
put wild animals into markets,” says Yuen. Respecting nature, he argues, “is
the way to stay away from the harm of emerging infections”."""

This is a totally foreign notion to me, wild animals into the food market,
what sort of examples can be found in such markets? Interesting thought to
consider wild vs domestic food sources and the tradeoffs between the two.
Domestic could have negative consequences too though like farmed fish with bad
farming practices vs wild fish.

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soperj
They do this in the western world too. It's just called venison.

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TheSpiceIsLife
There are deer farms in Australia.

Another good example, from Australia, of wild-harvest meat is Kangaroo and
Wallaby.

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taneq
And bush pigs, I believe, although I'm not sure if they're for human
consumption or just used in pet meat.

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TheSpiceIsLife
One of my siblings live in Norther Queensland, they hunt pig for pest control
and dog food.

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pfarnsworth
Have they ever discovered how the SARS virus was transmitted, despite the best
efforts of Toronto hospital staff to take the highest precautions? That was
the scariest part to me, that in continued to infect hospital staff in
Toronto, Canada, a modern 1st world city, despite all the precautions they
took.

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contingencies
To be clear after reading the article[0] this means "probably came from
horseshoe bats" not "probably came from this particular cave which happens to
be in Yunnan" or even "probably came from Yunnan". You can see from the
phylogenetic tree (figure 6) that they have heavily sampled Yunnan and Hong
Kong but there is only one sample from Guizhou and there are none from other
nearby locations. There are thousands of caves over this entire region, owing
to the dominant limestone and karst topography on this edge of the Himalayas.

Less scientifically, Yunnan is a long way from Guangdong and has zero popular
history of eating or handling bats. People from remote parts of Yunnan where
bats live do not often travel to Guangdong. While bats are known to harbour
different viruses, I am calling bullshit on Yunnan as the source of SARS.
There are many populations of bats in caves _far_ closer to Guangdong such as
far northeast Vietnam, Guangxi, Guizhou and probably Hunan and Fujian
provinces which would be preferable choices for source populations of trapped
wild bats.

[0]
[http://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/jo...](http://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/journal.ppat.1006698)

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chasil
Are bats responsible for any deadly diseases other than Ebola, Marburg, MERS
(camels?) and SARS?

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nl
In Australia, lyssaviruses, which are deadly. Also Hendra virus, also deadly.

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salty_biscuits
They are really just odd versions of rabies though

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kkylin
Rabies is deadly:
[https://www.cdc.gov/rabies/index.html](https://www.cdc.gov/rabies/index.html)

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salty_biscuits
True, I was just highlighting that they aren't really separate diseases to add
to the count.

