One of the hardest jobs on earth is searching for new viruses in animals such as bats. To get ready to work, researchers have to get dressed in protective clothing like bodysuits, googles, gloves, and boots that cover them from head to toe to protect them from getting infected. Then, they would have to go a cave and set up nets to catch the bats and use tarps to collect their droppings. Then, they would have droppings from more than a hundred bats to do tests on.
While studying these bat droppings, researchers from Smithsonian’s Global Health Program discovered six new coronaviruses from the same family of viruses as the one that caused COVID-19. Thankfully, the researchers do not believe that the new viruses are harmful to humans.
The leading person of the Global Health Program, Marc Valitutto, says that their goal is to find new viruses before they infect humans and prevent them from causing many deaths. Zoonotic pathogens, which can spread between humans and other animals, have caused almost three quarters of all infectious diseases in humans this past century. Most of these infectious diseases come from bats. This is because bats have strong immune systems that allow them to house viruses without being infected themselves. The fact that they travel far distances increases the possibility of them transferring a zoonotic disease to us. Sometimes, they carry coronaviruses, which are viruses that can cause infections relating to lungs and stomachs of birds and mammals. Research even shows that bats were the original hosts of SARS and MERS, which were both coronavirus that affected the respiratory system and killed many people. It is likely that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that caused COVID-19, also originated in bats. Bats can carry other diseases like filoviruses, like Marburg and Ebola.
Zoonotic diseases can also transfer from humans to bats, which can cause the bat populations to decrease and further spread the disease. Some organizations want researchers to stop working with bats to prevent this. But, researchers continued to do tests on bats by taking swabs and droppings from the bats. They collected 759 samples and found six new coronaviruses and one that we already discovered.