The Simplest Way to Prevent the Next Pandemic? Leave Bats Alone.

As we asked in our recent publication in The Lancet Planetary Health, how long will governments ignore the science that is in front of them? In the paper, we argue for a global taboo whereby humanity agrees to leave bats alone. People should not fear bats, and not try to chase them away or cull them; such actions would only serve to disperse them and increase the odds of zoonotic spillover. Based on the available science, we strongly believe that humanity simply needs to let bats have the habitats they need and live undisturbed.

This would not only lower the chances of another pandemic but would allow the world’s diverse bat species (there are more than 1,400) to continue to provide a range of incredibly important benefits. The ecosystem services bats provide — from insect control (which helps protect agricultural crops from pests and may well help protect us from mosquito-borne diseases) to crop pollination (important for more than 300 fruiting species, for example) — are worth billions of dollars annually.

Prevention of the next pandemic is not the same thing as dealing with one once it has been sparked. The ideas that have been put forward by the World Health Organization and other key institutions have been almost exclusively focused on preparedness and response. These are downstream (albeit vitally important) activities — for example, improving public health systems including data collection; advancing diagnostic and surveillance capabilities; strategic stockpiling of personal protective equipment, or PPE; reinforcing advances in vaccinology and other biomedical interventions; more robust planning for vaccine and PPE equity, and so on.

We strongly believe that humanity must take the simplest, most cost-effective, most common-sense upstream steps to lower the risk of another pandemic. Fixing humanity’s broken relationship with nature — and bats in particular — would diminish the interface where dangerous viruses can move from their normal hosts into people and other animals.

- More Here