COVID 19 – and more bad press for bats

In an earlier blog post [1], I asked the question “What’s not to like about bats?”. Accepting that bats are not universally popular, I pointed out that, for many, they are associated with unpleasantness and feature in several stories about witches. This is illustrated in the frightening image of Goya’s Witches’ Sabbath, where bats fly over the witches’ heads as they worship the devil in the form of a goat (see below, with detail).

Further in the blog post [1], I wrote:

This association with the “dark world” stems from the crepuscular and nocturnal habits of bats, and our nervousness about what happens during darkness – a “fear of the night” and anxiety about the possible presence of evil spirits. There is also something about the rapid flight of bats that some find disturbing and one belief is that they can become entangled in hair. ..A further prominent feature of folklore is that bat blood, or other extracts from the animals, cure eye diseases; arising, no doubt, from the ability of bats to be active in darkness.

We can now add another negative to the reputation of these fascinating mammals with the discovery that bats may be the source of the COVID19 global pandemic. In a paper published in The Lancet [2], Lu et al. write:

..on the basis of current data, it seems likely that the 2019-nCoV causing the Wuhan outbreak might also be initially hosted by bats, and might have been transmitted to humans via currently unknown wild animal(s) sold at the Huanan seafood markets.

One suggested intermediary is the pangolin, but other animals present in the market are more likely. But then, what if some of the Huanan stallholders knew of the folklore that bat blood aids the cure of eye diseases and rubbed infected bat blood into their eyes? This practice was known from Ancient Egypt, but mythologies travel. We will probably never know if this happened, but I hope that one of the solutions to our problems with this coronavirus is not the attempted extermination of bats, when the pandemic almost certainly results from the activities of humans.

[1] http://www.rwotton.blogspot.com/2014/04/whats-not-to-like-about-bats.html

[2] Roujian Lu + 34 co-authors (2020) Genomic characterisation and epidemiology of 2019 novel coronavirus: implications for virus origins and receptor binding. The Lancet 395:565-574.