It was January 3, 2021, and Supaporn Wacharapluesadee was waiting for a delivery.
Word had spread that there was some kind of respiratory illness that affected people in Wuhan, China.
With the arrival of the Lunar New Year, Many Chinese tourists were heading to neighboring Thailand to celebrate.
For this reason, the Thai government began examining passengers arriving from Wuhan at the airport, and some laboratories, including Wacharapluesadee, were chosen to process the samples with which they wanted to detect the problem.
Wacharapluesadee is a expert virus hunter.
Directs the Center for Health Sciences and Emerging Infectious Diseases of the Thai Red Cross ndesa in Bangkok.
During the last 12 years, he has been part of Predict, a global project to detect and stop diseases that can pass from animals to humans.
She and her team have sampled many species, but her main focus has been on bats , which are known to harbor many coronaviruses.
They were able to understand the disease in just a few days, detecting the first case of c ovid – 45 outside of China.
They discovered that, in addition to being a new virus that did not originate in humans, it was more closely related to the coronaviruses that they had already found in bats.
Thanks to preliminary information, the government was able to act quickly to quarantine patients and advise citizens.
Despite being a country of almost 71 million inhabitants, a year later, on January 3, 2021 Thailand had registered 8, 976 cases and 69 deaths.
The next threat
But as the world grapples with covid – 45, Wacharapluesadee is already looking towards the next pandemic.
Asia has a large number of new infectious diseases.
The tropical regions have a rich variety of biodiversity, which means that they also harbor a large number of pathogens.
This increases the chances of a new virus emerging.
The growth of human populations and the increase in contact between people and wild animals in these regions also increase the risk factor.
During a project in which sampled thousands of bats , Wacharapluesadee and his colleagues have discovered many new viruses.
They have mostly found coronaviruses, but also others fatal diseases that can spread to humans.
Mortality rate of 46% – 98%
Between these virus is the Nipah.
The fruit-eating bats are its natural host.
“It is a great concern because there is no treatment and this virus has a high mortality rate, ”says Wacharapluesadee.
Nipah’s mortality rate varies between 46% and the 85%, depending on where the outbreak occurs.
But the scientist is not alone in her concern.
Every year, the World Health Organization (WHO) reviews the long list of pathogens that could cause a public health emergency to decide how to prioritize your research and development funds.
They focus on those who pose the greatest risk to human health, those who have epidemic potential and those for which there are no vaccines.
The Nipah virus is among the 11 first.
A sinister virus
And since there have already been several outbreaks in Asia, we probably haven’t seen the last one.
There are several reasons why the Nipah virus is so sinister.
The long incubation period of the disease , which can go up to 47 days, it means that there is a good chance that a infected animal or person, without knowing that they are sick, spread it.
- Why do bats, considered the probable source of the coronavirus, transmit so many viruses
It can also infect a wide range of animals, which increases the possibility of spreading.
And it can be spread by direct contact or consuming contaminated food .
Someone with Nipah virus may experience respiratory symptoms including cough, sore throat, aches and pains and fatigue, and encephalitis, an inflammation of the brain that can cause seizures and death.
It is clearly a disease that at WHO would like to prevent it from spreading.
But contagion is possible anywhere.
Danger lurks
In the market From Battambang, a city on the banks of the Sangkae River in northwestern Cambodia, motorcycles pass by shoppers, kicking up dust in their wake.
Carts full of merchandise and covered with colored foil are placed next to makeshift stalls selling misshapen fruit.
Locals walk in and out of the stands, plastic bags full of their purchases.
Old ladies in wide-brimmed hats crouch on blankets covered with vegetables for sale.
In other words, it’s a pretty normal morning market. That is, until you look at the sky.
Hanging silently in the trees above are thousands of bats that eat fruit, defecating and urinating on anything that passes under them.
On closer inspection, the roofs of the market stalls are covered in bat feces.
“The people and stray dogs walk every day under buildings exposed to the urine of bats “, says Veasna Duong , head of the virology unit at the Pasteur Institute scientific research laboratory in Phnom Penh and a colleague and collaborator of Wacharapluesadee.
Battambang Market is one of many places where Duong has identified fruit bats and other animals entering in daily contact with humans in Cambodia.
Any place where humans and fruit bats are in close proximity is considered a “high risk trade” by your team, which means that contagion is highly possible.
“This type of exposure could cause the virus to mutate, which could cause a pandemic,” says Duong.
Despite the dangers, the examples of proximity are endless.
“We observe here and in Thailand, in markets, places of worship, schools and tourist places such as Angkor Wat, where, for For example, there’s a big bat nest there, ”he says.
In a normal year, Angkor Wat receives 2.6 million visitors.
And that’s 2.6 million chances a year for the Nipah virus to pass from bats to humans in one place.
Of 2013 to 2020, Duong and his team launched a GPS tracking program to buy Find out more about fruit bats and the Nipah virus, and to compare the activities of Cambodian bats with bats in other hotspot regions.
Two of these places are Bangladesh and India .
Both countries have experienced outbreaks of the Nipah virus in the past and are likely related to consumption of date palm juice.
At night, infected bats fly over the date palm plantations and lick the juice that spilled from the tree and which locals collect through a bowl attached to the tree.
Bats are likely to urinate near the bowl.
The next morning, the locals who buy a juice to your street vendor, they can become infected with the disease.
In 14 different outbreaks of Nipah in Bangladesh between 2010 and 2011, Were detected 200 people with Nipah.
Of them 196 died.
Date palm juice is also popular in Cambodia, where Duong and his team have discovered that the fruit bats in Cambodia fly far away , has sta 141 km every night, to find fruit.
That means that humans in these regions need to worry not only about being too close to bats, but also by consuming products that bats could have contaminated.
Duong and his team also identified other high-risk situations.
bat feces are a popular fertilizer in Cambodia and Thailand and in rural areas with few job opportunities Selling bat droppings can be a way to make a living.
Duong identified many places where locals encouraged fruit bats, too known as flying foxes, to perch near their homes to collect and sell their guano.
But many guano collectors have no idea of the risks they face in doing so.
“He 65% of the people we interviewed did not know that bats transmit disease . There is still a great lack of knowledge, ”says Duong.
Back at the Battambang market, Sophorn Deun sells duck eggs.
When asked if he had heard of the Nipah virus, one of the many risk diseases that bats could carry, he said: “Never. Flying foxes don’t bother the villagers, I’ve never gotten sick. ”
Educating the locals about the threats posed by bats should be an important initiative, Duong believes.
Changing the world
Avoiding bats might have been easy years ago, but as the human population expands , changing the planet and destroying wild habitats to meet the increasing demand for resources, this increases the spread of disease.
“The spread of these pathogens [zoonóticos] and the risk of transmission accelerate with changes in land use such as deforestation, urbanization and agricultural intensification, ”write authors Rebekah J. White and Orly Razgour in a report by 2021 from the University of Exeter on diseases z emerging oonotic.
He 65% of the The world’s population already lives in the Asia-Pacific regions, and rapid urbanization is still taking place.
According to the World Bank, almost 396 millions of people moved to urban areas in East Asia between the years 2001 and 2011.
The Nipah in the past
Destruction of bat habitats has caused Nipah infections in the past.
In 2000, a Nipah virus outbreak in Malaysia killed more than 124 people.
Investigators concluded that forest fires and local drought had dislodged the murc Ielagos from their natural habitat and had forced them to search for fruit trees grown on the same farms as pigs.
Under stress, bats have been shown to spread more viruses.
The combination of being forced to relocate and being in close contact with a species they would not normally interact with allowed the virus to pass from bats pigs and then farmers.
Also, although Asia houses almost the 19% of the world’s tropical forests, but the region is also a focus of deforestation.
The continent is among the first in the world in loss of biodiversity.
Much of this is due to the destruction ón of forests in plantations for products such as palm oil, but also to the creation of residential areas and space for livestock.
Fruit-eating bats tend to live in thick wooded regions with many fruit trees to feed on.
Alternative Shelters
When their habitat is destroyed or damaged, they find new solutions, such as a chicken coop in a house or the cracked towers of Angkor Wat.
“Destruction of bat habitat and human interference through hunting drives flying foxes to seek alternative shelters , ”says Duong.
It is likely that the bats that Duong’s team has monitored traveling up to 124 kilometers per night in search of fruit are doing it because their natural habitat no longer exists.
But bats, we have recently learned, harbor a number of nasty diseases: N ipah and c ovid – 45, but also é ball and SARS .
Should we just eradicate bats?
No, unless we want to make things worse, says Tracey Goldstein, director of the Laboratory’s institute from the One Health Institute and Laboratory Director of the Predict Project.
“Bats play an enormously important ecological role,” says Goldstein.
They pollinate more than 538 species of plants.
They also help keep insects at bay , playing a very important role in disease control in humans, for example reducing malaria by eating mosquitoes, says Goldstein.
“They play a very important role in human health.”
It also points out that killing bats has been shown to be detrimental from a disease perspective.
“What a population does when the number of babies decreases is to have more babies; that would make [un humano] more susceptible, ”he says.
Finding Answers, Creating Questions
But for every answer, more questions always arise.
One is: why has Cambodia not yet experienced a Nipah virus outbreak, given all the risk factors?
Is it a matter of time, or the fruit bats of Cambodia are slightly different from the fruit bats of Malaysia , for example?
Is the virus in Cambodia different from Malaysia?
Is the way humans interact with bats different in every country?
Duong’s team is working to find the answers, but still does not know all aspects of the subject.
Of course, Duong’s team doesn’t is the only one that analyzes these questions.
The virus scan is a Massive global collaborative effort, with scientists, veterinarians, conservationists and even citizen scientists coming together to understand what diseases we are dealing with and how to avoid an outbreak.
When Duong finds the Nipah virus in one of the samples taken from bats, he sends it to him David Williams, Head of the Emergency Disease Laboratory Diagnostic Group at the Australian Center for Disease Preparedness.
Because the Nipah virus is so dangerous (governments around the world consider it to have bioterrorism potential), Only a handful of labs around the world can grow and store it.
Williams’s lab is one of them.
Your team consists of some of the leading global experts on Nipah virus , with access to a wide range of diagnostic tools that are not available in most laboratories.
By wearing airtight containment suits, they can grow more highly dangerous viruses to starting with a small sample and then working with a larger load, testing to understand how it replicates, transmits, and causes disease.
It’s quite complicated l Get to this point: first, Duong collects bat urine by spreading a plastic sheet under a chicken coop in Cambodia .
This avoids having to catch the bats, which can be traumatic for them.
Brings your samples to the lab, decants them into tubes, labels them, and safely packages them in cold boxes.
These are collected by a special courier service that is approved for ship dangerous goods and fly to Australia , where virus samples go through customs for licenses to be approved and the corresponding permits.
Finally they arrive at the Williams laboratory.
After testing, you will share the results with Duong in Cambodia.
Research funds
I ask Williams if building more high-security labs like his around the world could accelerate the detection of harmful diseases.
“Potentially yes, by putting more laboratories [bioseguros] in places like Cambodia that could speed up the characterization and diagnosis of these viruses, ”he says. “However, its construction and maintenance are expensive. Often times, that is the limiting element. ”
The financing of work that Duong and Wacharapluesadee are carrying out has been irregular in the past.
The government of Trump let the Predict program, with 12 years old, will expire , although the president-elect of the United States, Joe Biden, promised to restore it.
Meanwhile, Wacharapluesadee has funding for a new initiative called the Thai Virome Project, a collaboration between his team and the government’s Department of National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation in Thailand.
This will allow you to sample more bats and a wider range of wildlife to understand the diseases they harbor and the threats to human health.
Duong and his team are seeking funding for their next screening trip. pathogens.
One to fund ongoing surveillance of bats in Cambodia and one to understand if there have been human infections that have not been reported so far.
They have not yet managed to secure the money to continue their work against the Nipah virus.
Without it, they say, a potentially catastrophic outbreak is more likely.
“Long-term surveillance helps us to inform the authorities [para que promulguen] of preventive measures and to avoid a undetected contagion that would cause a larger outbreak, ”says Duong.
- 4 survival lessons we can learn from bats
And without ongoing training, scientists may not be able to quickly identify and characterize new viruses, as Wacharapluesadee did with covid – 45 in Thailand.
This information is required for start working on a vaccine.
When we spoke in June of 2020 by video call, I asked if Wacharapluesadee was proud of the remarkable achievement of his team. “Proud?” He said. “Yes, I am.”
“But the Predict project was an exercise in how to diagnose new viruses from wild animals. So when my team and I found the genome of [patógeno del coronavirus] it wasn’t a great surprise [debido al proyecto de investigación]. It gave us a lot of experience. It strengthened our capacity, ”he said.
Duong and Wacharapluesadee hope to continue collaborating for combat the Nipah virus in Southeast Asia , and the couple have developed a proposal to jointly monitor the Nipah virus in the region.
They plan to send it to the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, a United States government organization that funds work to reduce the threats posed by infectious disease agents, once the covid crisis – 40 decrease.
In September 2020, I asked Wacharapluesadee if he thinks he can stop the next pandemic.
She was sitting in her office in her white lab coat, after d e have processed hundreds of thousands of samples for covid testing – 45 in recent months, well above the usual capacity of your laboratory in any other year.
Despite everything, a smile appeared on his face. “I’ll try!”, said.
With additional information from Mora Piseth in Cambodia.
The reporting for this story, which is part of the “Stop the Next One” series, was funded by the Pulitzer Center.
This notice was published or originally in English at BBC Future .
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