As of mid-March, “patient zero” for COVID-19 still had not been found, and who or what infected that person remains a mystery. There is even uncertainty about whether the viral jump from an unknown intermediate host to humans occurred in the location initially identified: an animal and seafood market in Wuhan, China. Despite these uncertainties and with no small assistance from scientists, the media has sensationalized the risks, settling on bats as the likely culprit and thus making them targets in a viral witch hunt.

Around the world, bats are feeling the effects of this misinformation. My Malaysian colleague Sheema Abdul Aziz has spent years documenting the key role of flying fox bats as essential pollinators of Southeast Asia’s multi-billion-dollar-a-year durian crop. Growers were planning to join her in a public education campaign explaining the value of bats, but now they fear a public backlash and are reluctant to support her efforts. A local resort has expressed fear of loss of sales due to a nearby flying fox colony. Fearing her research will trigger a new disease outbreak, private citizens have even asked the government to stop her from handling bats and to support eradication—a response already reported in neighboring Indonesia. My colleagues in China are also deeply concerned about the demonization of bats and calls for their eradication.

Even in my home city of Austin, Texas, where we have safely enjoyed sharing a downtown bridge with 1.5 million bats for decades, growing numbers of people are asking about disease risks. Despite warnings from poorly informed health officials that our bats were rabid and dangerous, they’ve yet to transmit a single case of disease. They simply attract millions of tourist dollars each summer and control tons of crop pests each night. Texas bats are worth more than a billion dollars annually. Now bat-lovers are experiencing a backlash against putting up bat houses because neighbors say they fear that attracting bats will bring disease.

But simply telling people that bats are valuable and shouldn’t be killed can’t counter panic. I have personally investigated instances where fearful humans burned, poisoned, or sealed caves, killing millions of bats at a time. Based on my experience, I have concluded that there is no greater threat than the intolerance and eradication that results from misguided fear.

Exaggerated warnings of bat disease risks aren’t just misguided. They threaten the health of entire ecosystems and economies. Researchers in Indonesia conservatively estimate that bats save cacao growers more than $700 million annually in avoided insect damage. In Mexico, tequila and mescal production worth billions annually relies on bats that pollinate agaves. From Southeast Asia to the Mediterranean, bats provide key pest control for rice growers. In South Africa, macadamia growers benefit from bat control of stink bugs.

Despite a long tradition of being misunderstood and feared, perhaps it’s because of their nocturnal habits and erratic flight that bats have an outstanding record of living safely with humans. Millions living in backyard bat houses, city parks, and bridges have proven to be safe neighbors. I have never been attacked and am still healthy after more than 60 years studying and handling hundreds of species worldwide, sometimes surrounded by millions in caves. Because, like veterinarians, I am occasionally bitten by unfamiliar animals I handle, I’m vaccinated against rabies.

For anyone who simply avoids handling bats, the odds of contracting any disease from one is incalculably small. All diseases attributed to bats are easily avoided, even when bats live in one’s yard.

However, these facts typically go unreported, while risks are often magnified. The March 11 issue of Scientific American provides an excellent example. Its COVID-19 article subhead reads, “Wuhan-based virologist Shi Zhengli has identified dozens of deadly SARS-like viruses in bat caves, and she warns there are more out there.” The use of “deadly” is unjustified speculation.

The article also claims that the Wuhan outbreak is the sixth outbreak caused by bats in the past 26 years. In fact, the first four listed (SARS, MERS, Hendra, Ebola) appear to have been transmitted to people by animals other than bats—yet bats still receive primary blame. The fifth, the Nipah virus, which likely is spread to people from flying fox bats, is easily prevented by simply covering collection containers or pasteurizing contaminated palm juice.

Two possible scenarios have been hypothesized for the COVID-19 outbreak. The first is that a new coronavirus entered an intermediate host animal, such as a pangolin, where it evolved over an undetermined period to gradually become a threat to people. Alternatively, the new coronavirus could have been harmless when it first entered humans, but over time evolved to become virulent. Such scenarios would be difficult to predict, and a publication currently under review even points to mice and domestic pigs as possible sources.

So why has the media almost universally blamed bats? In part, because scientists have disproportionately focused on sampling them.

Since 2005, when coronaviruses in horseshoe bats were first hypothesized to be the ancestors of the coronavirus that caused SARS, bats have received far more scrutiny than any other group of animals. For example, in the study on which the scariest headlines were based, researchers sampled nearly twice as many bats as rodents, shrews, and nonhuman primates combined and didn’t even include carnivores or ungulates.

Easily blamed due to their lack of popularity, bats are also the easiest mammals to quickly sample in large numbers. This led to rapid publication of the results, and sensational speculations were deemed more acceptable when focused on already-feared animals.

Not surprisingly, more viruses have been found in bats than in less-surveyed species, so biased speculation has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. We don’t yet know if bats have more viruses than other animals because we haven’t similarly sampled others. And even if bats do have more, the number of viruses isn’t necessarily indicative of transmission risk. Many viruses are innocuous or possibly even beneficial.

Some virologists have capitalized on the fear of pandemics to promote funding for viral surveys in nature as a possible means of preventing or mitigating these scary events. They convinced the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to budget $4.8 billion in 2019 for surveys searching for potentially high-risk viruses. Referring to the COVID-19 pandemic, longtime surveying proponents now argue that the best way forward is to prevent future outbreaks by beginning with surveys to find and catalog wildlife viruses globally, focusing particularly on high-risk groups such as bats.

However, many leading experts strongly disagree. They argue that such surveys would be extremely costly and have little practical value. Viral-caused outbreaks are exceedingly rare, and their emergence is unpredictable. The evolutionary virologist Edward Holmes and associates note that even if all current viruses could be cataloged, new variants of RNA viruses are constantly evolving. They bluntly warn of arrogance and loss of credibility resulting from promises that viral surveys could prevent or even mitigate pandemics.

To understand why surveying will fail as a strategy, consider the examples of MERS, West Nile, and Zika viruses. MERS jumped to humans from a seemingly unlikely source—camels—in Saudi Arabia, previously believed to be an extremely improbable location for such an incident. Robert Tesh, an expert on emerging viruses, has pointed out that neither West Nile nor Zika viruses are new. They simply spilled over when transported to new areas in incidents that couldn’t have been predicted.

A growing number of leading epidemiologists agree that it isn’t possible to predict the animal origin of the next viral outbreak. Unfortunately, their warnings are seldom covered by public media. When they are, they tend to be de-emphasized.

Finding the true source and means of infection for patient zero in the current outbreak seems far more important than condemning bats or spending billions on searches for potential pathogens. Such public health funds would be much better directed toward improved early detection in humans.

But we humans must also address our own culpability. Caging and slaughtering a wide variety of animals in markets virtually guarantees the spread of viral infections. Blaming already unpopular bats only increases already severe threats to their survival, despite scientific certainty about the enormous benefits they provide to both the environment and societies. Care about bats or not, we should see COVID-19 as a grim reminder that human well-being requires responsible stewardship of nature—not just dominance.

The post Stop Blaming Bats for This Pandemic appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But scientists didn’t have a hint of the true nature of viruses until 1892, when a Russian botanist realized tobacco plants were getting sick because of an unknown, invisible, and incredibly tiny pathogen—something far smaller, even, than bacteria.

Even today, with advanced microscopes and imaging technologies at researchers’ fingertips, it remains nearly impossible to “see” viruses in the lab. Which is why biologist David S. Goodsell started making watercolor paintings of them instead.

Goodsell, a computational biologist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California and the RCSB Protein Data Bank, came of age as a researcher during the 1980s, trying to decipher the shapes of proteins and DNA. He wanted to be able to visualize the detail of what was going on within the cells he was studying, too—but computers weren’t yet powerful enough to synthesize what was known about the chemistry of individual proteins and the larger structures of cells. It was impossible, in the lab, to create a graphical “vision of what the whole thing looks like,” he says.

But Goodsell thought such a thing might be possible with low-tech tools. His grandfather had taught him to paint watercolors—”traditional scenes of barns and trees”—when he was young. If imaging technologies couldn’t produce a picture of the biology Goodsell wanted to visualize, perhaps he could do it himself, with some imagination and a brush.

Thus Goodsell’s “Molecular Landscapes” were born. Surveying scientific papers that described viruses and the proteins within them—sometimes with images and other times with data from DNA sequences and atomic structures—he began assembling mental images of the things he worked on.

Goodsell’s first paintings depicted DNA. The lab he worked in was trying to develop an anti-cancer medication that would bind to the molecule’s double helix. Goodsell hoped that painting what DNA’s tiniest nooks and crannies looked like close up might help with the drug design.

As Goodsell’s research focus evolved, he began painting viruses.

Viruses are made up of bits of genetic material—strands of RNA or DNA—organized by proteins. Whether viruses are alive or not depends on how you define “living.” Viruses don’t have the cellular machinery to fuel respiration or metabolism, but still they reproduce—even if they only succeed by working their way into a host cell and using its resources to find new cells to infect. Viruses can’t move on their own, relying instead on a sneeze, a kiss, or a vector, like a mosquito to spread and multiply.

When Goodsell started studying HIV, the retrovirus that causes AIDS, he also began painting it. Since then he has created about a dozen HIV watercolors, updating the images as science improved our understanding of the virus’s biology. In Goodsell’s early HIV paintings he depicted the outside of the virus as if it were studded with protruding proteins. Now that journal articles report that HIV actually has very few of these proteins attached to it, he paints the structures in a patchier configuration.

In his paintings, Goodsell always strikes a careful balance between remaining faithful to the data and “taking artistic license when things are less well characterized.” When he painted the Zika virus in 2016, Goodsell couldn’t find much information on the cells that Zika targets for infection, so instead the painting depicts an immune system cell.

Similarly, in 2014, he completed a painting of Ebola at a moment when a lot was known about the virus proteins but almost nothing was known about the connections between them. “I had to work things out based on the size,” he muses. “Maybe they know more about it now.”

Goodsell often chooses subjects from the headlines. His new coronavirus painting, inspired by the COVID-19 epidemic, is in fact a depiction of the SARS coronavirus that emerged in China in 2002, causing respiratory disease in more than 8,000 people and eventually killing 774. There are many types of coronaviruses—some of which mainly infect birds, others that are common in mammals such as humans. Many cause no illness at all. Some bring on minor woes like the common cold.

Goodsell found electron microscope images of the entire SARS virus, which is surrounded by a ring of so-called “spike proteins”—“very pretty … like a little crown”—that help the virus attach to and enter the cells it targets. (These “spike proteins” also inspire the coronavirus’s name: “corona” means “crown.”) He was able to find data that explained the protein structure of the spike proteins but had to imagine what the membrane protein that reorganizes the DNA inside the cell might look like. His painting captures the moment when a coronavirus is breathed into the respiratory tract, not yet attached to a cell. The greenish curlicues around it are mucus; little yellow “Y”s are antibodies.

Computers today are far more advanced than what Goodsell had to work with in the 1980s. For the last five years or so, scientists have had machines that let them generate images of viruses and the like, integrating information from multiple sources without an artist’s brain mediating the mix.

Goodsell welcomes the advances—and plans to continue painting. His next series will depict vaccines, including poliovirus as it is neutralized and a recombinant influenza vaccine. The pieces will debut at a show in Wichita later this year.

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