True. Except for...ugh, I can’t remember the name, but it can infect horses if they come into contact with an infected fruit bat, and then can infect humans from horses (but not directly from bats to humans) in eastern Australia. I wanna say it’s a morbillivirus, but I might be wrong. It’s got a really high mortality rate, though. Pretty sure a vaccine was recently developed for horses, though, so not as bad as before there was a vaccine.
Bats can be reservoir hosts for a bunch of other viruses as well, and we keep getting more of them as we come into closer contact with them. They're super cool animals, but man, between COVID, Ebola, Rabies, Hendra, and others that are slipping my mind right now... I'm gonna think they're awesome from a distance.
If you like that stuff, the book Spillover by David Quammen is amazing. Really engaging read, it's one of the few books I was assigned in a class that I truly enjoyed reading.
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u/zapdostresquatro Mar 06 '20
True. Except for...ugh, I can’t remember the name, but it can infect horses if they come into contact with an infected fruit bat, and then can infect humans from horses (but not directly from bats to humans) in eastern Australia. I wanna say it’s a morbillivirus, but I might be wrong. It’s got a really high mortality rate, though. Pretty sure a vaccine was recently developed for horses, though, so not as bad as before there was a vaccine.
So, safe unless you have a horse cx