"Bat flies bite people if given the chance," Goldberg says of the parasite, which he described as "shockingly large, leggy and fast - a parasite from hell." However, it is well known that ectoparasites transmit disease, says the Wisconsin epidemiologist, noting that things like ticks and fleas harbor important pathogens like typhus, bubonic plague, Lyme disease and Rocky Mountain spotted fever. That said, he adds that "we don't know if this virus is transmitted beyond the ectoparasite. "These things were chock-full of the virus," says Goldberg, a professor of pathobiological sciences at UW-Madison's School of Veterinary Medicine. The bat fly, according to the new study, was infected with a newly discovered rhabdovirus dubbed Kanyawara virus, a distant relative of the rabies virus. It is a fruit bat and was trapped, tested and released by Goldberg's colleague and study co-author Robert Kityo of Uganda's Makerere University in Kampala.
The bat in the study belongs to the megabat suborder. It's a great way to get around - from animal to animal - at minimal expense and effort," Goldberg explains. "From a virus's perspective, an ectoparasite is like Uber. For the virus, the fly plays the role of chauffeur. And it plays host to a virus, as the current study shows. It depends on the bat to be both its eyes and wings. The parasite in the current study is an eyeless, wingless fly, technically an ectoparasite. The role of bat parasites in maintaining chains of viral infection is little studied, and the new Wisconsin study serves up some intriguing insights into how viruses co-opt parasites to help do the dirty work of disease transmission. Many viral pathogens often have more than one or two hosts or intermediate hosts needed to complete their life cycles.
Their work, described in a report published July 13 in Nature Scientific Reports, identifies all three players as potentially new species, at least at the molecular level as determined by their genetic sequences. To better understand the dynamics of bats and potential threats to human health, Goldberg and his colleagues explored the relationship of an African forest bat, a novel virus and a parasite. "But bats are also increasingly acknowledged as hosts of medically significant viruses. "The fact is that they provide important ecosystem services - insect control, pollination and seed dispersal, to name a few - and we want them around," says Tony Goldberg, a University of Wisconsin-Madison epidemiologist and virus hunter. But scientific evidence to support such speculation is scant, at best.Ī lack of evidence that bats are key reservoirs of human disease has not prevented their vilification or efforts to exterminate bat colonies where threats are presumed to lurk. For example, some speculate that bats play a role in the transmission of Ebola simply because Ebola and Marburg are related pathogens. Aside from well-established things like rabies virus, SARS coronavirus (the virus that causes severe acute respiratory syndrome) and Marburg virus (an extremely dangerous but rare hemorrhagic fever pathogen), bats appear to carry a plethora of other germs with unclear effects on human health, if any.Īnd even some commonly believed bat paradigms may be incorrect.
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