Day 170: In a cavern, in a canyon, excavating for a mine...

Deaths worldwide have topped 600,000. In the US, Florida is now well in the lead of Texas and is eyeing California's #2 spot. Massachusetts cases are up a quarter of a percentage point today.

The mainstream news of the day seems to be the New York Times' sketchy take on a study out of South Korea, in which the Korean scientists were careful to state that they did not determine the direction of transmission, or even that transmission was familial at all. Nevertheless, the Times jumps to the conclusion that children aged 10 and up can transmit the disease as well as adults. Just one of those coronavirus "facts" you'll probably need to conveniently forget later...

The interesting news of the day, however, is a commentary in Independent Science News on the lab origin theory of the current pandemic. PlagueBlog readers may recall previous made-in-a-lab theories involving the mysterious coronavirus sequence known as RaTG13, and Dr. Shi of the suspiciously-located Wuhan Institute of Virology. This theory differs on a few points. It accepts RaTG13 as a genuine, natural coronavirus, spends a good deal of time debunking the opposition (an oft-cited review in Nature from March), and tells a new story about COVID-"19" in which it is actually COVID-12:

The story begins in April 2012 when six workers in that same Mojiang mine fell ill from a mystery illness while removing bat faeces. Three of the six subsequently died.

In a March 2020 interview with Scientific American Zeng-li Shi dismissed the significance of these deaths, claiming the miners died of fungal infections. Indeed, no miners or deaths are mentioned in the paper published by the Shi lab documenting the collection of RaTG13 (Ge et al., 2016).

But Shi’s assessment does not tally with any other contemporaneous accounts of the miners and their illness (Rahalkar and Bahulikar, 2020). [...]

Fortunately, a detailed account of the miner’s diagnoses and treatments exists. It is found in a Master’s thesis written in Chinese in May 2013. Its suggestive English title is “The Analysis of 6 Patients with Severe Pneumonia Caused by Unknown viruses“.

The authors had the thesis translated, from which it became clear the miners suffered from a disease very similar to COVID-19, and not from fungal infection. In fact their doctors consulted with China's expert on SARS and sent samples to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, from which (they hypothesize) the virus later escaped.

The flurry of virus-hunting behavior in the mine by Dr. Shi and others after the miners fell ill is thus deeply suspicious, as is their publication of RaTG13 and a prior subsequence without any comment on the miners or their disease, instead asserting that the distant Yunnan province mine where they collected their samples was "abandoned".

To account for the differences between RaTG13 and its closest coronaviral relative, SARS-CoV-2, the authors propose viral evolution within the six miners as their "Mojiang Miners Passage (MMP) hypothesis". Specifically, the virus evolved in their lungs, an unusual locus of coronavirus infection (at the time) that they believe was particularly conducive to the recombination of RaTG13 and other coronaviruses from the mine into SARS-CoV-2.

They also posit an explanation for the long delay between COVID-12 and COVID-19:

Our supposition as to why there was a time lag between sample collection (in 2012/2013) and the COVID-19 outbreak is that the researchers were awaiting BSL-4 lab construction and certification, which was underway in 2013 but delayed until 2018.

We propose that, when frozen samples derived from the miners were eventually opened in the Wuhan lab they were already highly adapted to humans to an extent possibly not anticipated by the researchers. One small mistake or mechanical breakdown could have led directly to the first human infection in late 2019.

In conclusion, they call for an independent investigation of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, as well as of the "conflicts of interest" they see as suppressing the escaped-from-a-lab hypothesis.

PlagueBlog notes there is something off about the notion that six miners breathing bat guano could substitute for the missing human evolution phase of SARS-CoV-2 that has made it so stable since. It is particularly mysterious how all six of them fell so ill at the same time, and yet the mine has failed to start the number of pandemics this rate of attack would seem to promise. Bats are not known for flying about in tiny masks, so perhaps the mine workers themselves did something unusually unsanitary. They were allegedly cleaning out bat guano at the time they fell ill, which doesn't seem like the most productive or typical miner employment.

PlagueBlog recommends that, when you see a bat, you run screaming in the other direction. (A mask should not be worn for this purpose, as it impedes proper screaming.) In particular, do not gather or eat its guano for any reason whatsoever.

The Smoking Bat

Via ProMED-mail: SciDev.Net reports on a study tracing the 2007 Ebola outbreak in the Congo to the consumption of fruit bats.

For the new study, researchers led by Eric Leroy from the International Centre for Medical Research in Franceville, Gabon, interviewed locals about the background of the Ebola cases. They were told that the annual migration of the fruit bat Hypsignathus monstrosus was particularly large in 2007.
Bats are an important source of protein in the area as wild animals are in short supply. They are often shot and then sold covered in blood.
The researchers believe the source of the 2007 outbreak was a man who bought bats at market. He survived, experiencing only a low fever, but his four-year-old daughter died after developing a sudden fever accompanied by vomiting. A family friend who prepared the girl's body for burial was subsequently infected and went on to infect 11 members of her family, all of whom died.

90% Mortality Rates

Via ProMED-mail: The Hartford Courant reports a 90% mortality rate for the state's bats from white-nose syndrome.

Jenny Dickson, the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection wildlife biologist supervising the detection and control of white-nose syndrome in the state, said Tuesday that visits to two sample caves in Litchfield County in the past two weeks revealed veritable bat catacombs. Dickson's team of wildlife experts found thousands of dead bats floating like dead fish in standing water, or stacked on top of each other along the flat ledges of the cave walls.
"It was grim, and you don't have to be a scientist to realize the implications for the environment inside those caves," said Dickson. "This is a massive, unprecedented die-off, with significant potential impacts on nature, especially insect control."

Bats from all over the Northeast migrate through Connecticut, so expect more mosquitoes this summer.

In other 90% mortality news, a German researcher pricked herself instead her intended mouse victim with a needle full of Ebola-Zaire last week. She's still in isolation, showing no symptoms and being treated with an experimental vaccine. See the AAAS blog for more information.

Boy Meets Bat

Via Universal Hub: boy meets bat in basement and may yet live to tell about it.

Please remember that bats are not our friends. Bats are blood-sucking, disease-bearing flying rats out of a Cthulhu Christmas Special where the lucky ones die early and the handsome brave ones die pathetically later, foaming at the mouth and biting their friends in order to spread the madness. Just keep away. If you happen to come into contact with a slow-moving bat, save it for testing and see a doctor. Likewise for squirrels.

Up to a hundred people die of rabies every day in Asia because they don't know enough to seek treatment. Here in civilization, bats are the up-and-coming culprit:

Recently, bat rabies has emerged as an important epidemiologic reservoir in some parts of the world (i.e. the Americas and Australia). In North America, most documented human rabies deaths occurred as a result of infection from the silver haired bat rabies virus variant and in Australia at least two human deaths have occurred from exposure to a previously unrecognized rabies virus. In South America, wildlife rabies, especially bat rabies is increasing. For the first time in 2003, more people died from rabies following bites from wildlife than from dogs in South America.

Bat Woman Found on Facebook

ProMED-mail reports that the mysterious woman who brought a rabid bat to the Toronto Wildlife Center has been found and inoculated:

Toronto Public Health has located the woman who had delivered an injured bat to the Toronto Wildlife Centre that later tested positive for rabies. Finding her proved to be very challenging as the Wildlife Centre did not have her updated demographic information. After several attempts to locate her, including a media release, proved to be unsuccessful, one of the communications staff at Toronto Public Health suggested using the website "Facebook.com".

If you come across an injured rodent of a populous and frequently rabid species, Plagueblog recommends that you walk away and let Darwin handle the situation.

Adopt-A-Rabid-Bat Month

Via ProMED-mail: the Casper Star-Tribune reports on a case of rabies exposure at Trinity Lutheran School in Riverton, Wyoming:

A staff member on May 9 discovered the bat in the school basement, where it was captured and stored in a cage in Steve Coniglio's seventh- and eighth-grade classroom.
It was also displayed in other classrooms, and students fed it crickets through the cage. No one is believed to have touched the bat directly, head teacher Susan Tucker said.
School officials notified a local veterinarian after the bat died suddenly on May 11. The state Department of Health was called in once the animal tested positive for the rabies virus.
Coniglio and a teacher's aide who washed the cage without protective gloves after the bat died are receiving the rabies vaccine as a precaution.

PlagueBlog recommends getting your pets from an animal shelter, pet store, or reputable breeder.

Duvenhage Virus: The New Rabies

ProMED-mail reported last week on the death of a 77-year-old South African man who contracted Duvenhage virus from a bat scratch. Duvenhage is a Lyssavirus related to rabies:

Duvenhage virus was 1st discovered in 1970 when a man developed fatal rabies-like disease after being bitten indoors at night by an unidentified insectivorous bat about 80 km from the present incident. The only 2 other isolations of Duvenhage virus were made from bats: in 1981, it was obtained from a _Miniopterus schreibersi_ insectivorous bat which had been caught in daylight by a cat in Makhado town (formerly Louis Trichardt) in Limpopo province, about 250 km to the north of the present incident, and in 1986, the virus was obtained from an insectivorous bat, _Nycteris thebaica_, caught near a mine shaft across the border from Limpopo province in Zimbabwe.

Ebola Bats

Via ProMED-mail: In the current issue of Nature, scientists consider Fruit bats as reservoirs of Ebola virus:

The first recorded human outbreak of Ebola virus was in 1976, but the wild reservoir of this virus is still unknown. Here we test for Ebola in more than a thousand small vertebrates that were collected during Ebola outbreaks in humans and great apes between 2001 and 2003 in Gabon and the Republic of the Congo. We find evidence of asymptomatic infection by Ebola virus in three species of fruit bat, indicating that these animals may be acting as a reservoir for this deadly virus.

From the Don't Eat the Guano files...

The New York Times reports that two groups of researches have independently identified the Chinese horseshoe bat as the natural reservoir for the SARS virus.

The bats apparently are healthy carriers of SARS, which caused severe economic losses, particularly in Asia, as it spread to Canada and other countries. In Asia, many people eat bats or use bat feces in traditional medicine for asthma, kidney ailments and general malaise.

Thanks to an unnamed source for the link.