Did Coronavirus Come From Bat Guano Trade?

Scientists suspect COVID-19 originally came from bats. Despite the pandemic, the global trade in bat products continues, including their invaluable dung called Guano.

Vat guano is commonly used worldwide as a fertilizer, but it is also used as a medicine. It can be found on Amazon, the largest online shopping site in the United States. The Grocery & Gourmet Foods category includes a 1 gram listing at a price of $ 2.95 from a traditional herbal medicine vendor.

Virus storage

Known as Ye Ming Sha, or Night Ling Sand, Bat Guano is one of the most popular ingredients in traditional Chinese medicine. It is used to treat eye disorders, congestion and embolism.

Bats were traditionally thought to promote night vision because bats catch flying insects at night. Some healers recommend direct contact with bat dung.

In 2005, Wuhan-based virologist Shi Zhengli (now known as the “Batwoman”) found dozens of deadly worms found in samples of bat dung that Shi and her team collected in caves. The SARS-like coronavirus was identified.

One of these fecal samples contained a viral genome that was 96% identical to the coronaviruses that are currently widespread worldwide.

Recently, a team led by Smithsonian scientist Mark Valittut discovered six entirely new coronaviruses in the urine sample of 464 bats. Studies show that these viruses belong to the same family as SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

“Guano is dangerous because the virus lurks,” Dr. Robert Siegel, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Stanford University, told VOA.

The exact mechanism by which the coronavirus jumps from bats to humans is the subject of intense global research. Scientists suggest that the virus is contained in the bat’s blood and saliva, so the infection may have come from a bite. However, bats generally do not bite humans.

“Most bats do not bite, especially the types of bats that are associated with coronavirus outbreaks,” Siegel said.

Instead, humans most often use bats, where workers collect guano of bats from caves, and miners and cave explorers breathe for hours in the same limited space as colonies of bats. You can get infected just by spending time from.

“Bat risk is largely related to how much people are in contact with bats,” Siegel said.

Three years ago, Shi was called to investigate the outbreak of a virus on a mining shaft, where six miners suffered from a pneumonia-like illness that killed two.

“The fungal-covered Bat Guano messed up the cave,” She said in a report released last month to Scientific American. She said it must have been a matter of time before miners became ill.

Another 2013 Thai scientific report found coronavirus in approximately 4% of bat guano samples collected and advised workers to enhance their personal protection when harvesting guano in caves.

Dangerous trade

Wuhan’s so-called “wet market”, where live animals are sold, is where the first outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic is suspected.

However, German scientist Tordi Wassener, who studied the outbreak, suspects that the original infection was through bat dung rather than bat flesh.

When the coronavirus genome was first published by Chinese researchers in late January, Wassenaar sought to further examine the sequence and identify where the outbreak began.

One of the questions she asked her was, “How did it reach humans because it’s clear that the virus is a bat virus?” Zou Ying, co-author of her and her Wuhan colleague Zou Ying, said in February that people often come into close contact with living bats for traditional Chinese medicine rather than food. Argued.

“The key to this question is money,” she told VOA, because the Chinese drug market, including Bat Guano, is much larger than its meat market. And it puts the workers collecting raw materials at high risk.

“Bats are still being caught to sell parts of the body, providing the possibility for the virus to jump into humans, either directly or through an intermediate mammalian host,” she said.

China neglects guanolisk

There is no evidence that drugs made from bat guano can infect coronaviruses. In 2005, one Chinese respiratory expert, Zhong Nanshan, downplayed the risk of bat guano when Chinese researchers were working on another coronavirus outbreak of SARS. He usually steams, cooks, or fries guano before it goes into medicine, so he will be killed within minutes, even if the virus is present.

“You don’t have to worry about taking Ye Ming Sha,” Zhong said, according to a news report in The Information Times in the Guangzhou Daily report.

Other supporters of Ye Minsha’s sale also argued that it is unlikely to contain an infectious virus by the time it is first dried and reaches its customers.

For some scientists, the end product is not the only or even a major risk.

They believe that as long as the bat guano is sold, people will continue to enter the cave to collect it and risk being infected by another bat coronavirus.