#hendra virus

[maddyjones2]

Dogs and horses have a lyme disease vaccine because the antivaxers didn't get that vaccine withdrawn. They went hard on an australian horse vaccine for hendra but haven't won that fight.

[dilfsisko]

‘Oh there are no rabies in Australia I’ll take the bat’ FALSE. While it might not be rabies proper Australia has its OWN lyssavirus, Australian Bat Lyssavirus.

[mightyflamethrower]

Authored by Martin Hoyt via RealClearHealth,

It did not have to be this way. The COVID-19 pandemic cost American citizens their lives, their livelihoods, education, mental health, reputations and, ultimately, civil and religious freedoms. “The U.S. accounts for less than 5% of the world’s population, but more than 25% of total COVID-19 cases reported across the globe, and it currently ranks among the top 10 countries in COVID-19-related deaths per capita,” wrote the authors of  2023 commentary in the Journal of the American Medical Association. And for all that, we have government to thank.  

For years leading up to the pandemic, the nation had spent billions on preparation and planning for a biohazard attack or event. Whatever we learned was quickly discarded or undone by a lack of accountability, transparency, and humility. Decades of planning and untold man hours of research and training were rendered ineffective by a corrupt culture of greed, self-importance, scientific misconduct, and outright fraud. Because, while the government worked to prevent the worst, it was also helping to create chaos and contagion by funding and facilitating gain of function (GOF) research. 

GOF research refers to laboratory efforts to make viruses deadlier or to increase their transmissibility. The potential for disaster is obvious. Almost five years prior to the pandemic Dr. Marc Lipsitch and Dr. Alison Galvani noted that GOF pathogenic research posed “a risk of accidental and deliberate release that, if it led to extensive spread of the new agent, could cost many lives … Furthermore, the likelihood of risk is multiplied as the number of laboratories conducting such research increases around the globe.” 

But according to Dr. Anthony Fauci’s emails and other NIAID communications obtained via FOIA – those that weren’t deleted by the now-infamous “FOIA lady” – the Wuhan lab was working on Covid research with the U.S. as early as 2015. And the worst happened. Dr. Richard H. Ebright of Rutgers University told a Senate committee hearing on June 18, 2024, that “… lapses in U.S. oversight of gain-of-function research and enhanced potential pandemic pathogen research likely contributed to the origin of COVID-19 …” 

While Ebright said GOF has no medical utility, he emphasized that there are “major incentives to researchers worldwide, in China, and in the U.S. The researchers undertake this research because it is easy, they get the money, and they can get the papers [in science journals].” 

Not surprisingly, China was selected because it was quicker and cheaper to conduct research without U.S. government entanglements or oversight. Dr. Steven Quay also testified on June 18 and said the Wuhan Institute of Virology is a “level-2 lab,” as opposed to highly secure level-4 labs elsewhere. Moreover, Dr. Fauci et al were able to fund this research because the law was silent. Ebright again:  

… in this category of research, which is the most significant in terms of consequences and potentially existential risk there is almost no regulation with force of law. No regulation with force of law for biosafety or any pathogen other than the smallpox virus and no regulation with force of law for bio risk management for any pathogen.

But the U.S. and the world, may have temporarily escaped imminent catastrophe. Consider, according to Dr. Quay, what Wuhan obtained from Canada’s National Microbiology Lab in 2019: “two vials each of 15 strains of virus: seven varieties of Ebola virus, the Hendra virus, and two strains of Nipah virus, Malaysia and Bangladesh.” These virus samples, according to Dr. Steven Quay, are “the top three most deadly human pathogens on the planet.” The samples were obtained under murky circumstances (“described as a possible policy breach”) from a level-4 lab and surreptitiously flown on a commercial flight to Beijing where they were subsequently placed in a level-2 lab overseen by a country with a long history of a disregard for proper safety protocols.

Gain of function research probably created COVID-19, but our legislative and executive branches created the conditions for the disaster. Congress failed to pass laws governing specific GOF research, both Congress and the executive branch failed to effectively manage the federal health and science bureaucracy, and various agencies failed to monitor the behavior and performance of grantees and vendors engaged in GOF research. When catastrophe struck, self-interest and political survival of those responsible overrode the best interests of our citizenry. 

Who in the government benefited? How and to what extent did they benefit? Did any GOF research contribute to the U.S. global or response? Is GOF research being rerouted to our defense and security agencies to avoid scrutiny? NIAID continues to stall, obfuscate, and otherwise restrict transparency to its current and past activities. We know there was a concerted effort by senior leaders like Anthony Fauci to hide or delete emails but many other records still likely exist that remain uncovered.

This must change. Any research activity or sponsorship of scientific endeavors that are capable of mass extinction, such as GOF, must be subjected to a higher level of accountability and scrutiny by our elected leaders and the American public. Accountability, transparency, and public debate after an international crisis like Covid-19 can’t undo the global catastrophic harm that was done. It can, however, reduce the ability of our public health bureaucracy to contribute to the next disaster or looming crisis.

Borrowed from:

(https://stuff-that-irks-me.tumblr.com/)

[fiercestpurpose]

The flowers of the eucalyptus tree are a go-to meal for bats. A new research paper proposes that when bats go hungry, their immune system is not as capable of keeping viruses in check. And viruses that bats harbor, like Hendra, can then spill over to other animals — and to humans.

A very scary idea: habitat loss for bats can make a devastating virus outbreak in the human population much more likely.

Plants and animals are worth saving for their own sake, but environmentalism has never been about an abstract "environment" that is somehow separate from human concerns. It's almost like we're all part of the same global ecosystem, or something.

[sciencespies]

To prevent the next pandemic, restore wildlife habitats

https://sciencespies.com/environment/to-prevent-the-next-pandemic-restore-wildlife-habitats/

To prevent the next pandemic, restore wildlife habitats

Preserving and restoring natural habitats could prevent pathogens that originate in wildlife from spilling over into domesticated animals and humans, according to two new companion studies.

The research, based in Australia, found that when bats experience loss of winter habitat and food shortages in their natural settings, their populations splinter, and they excrete more virus. When populations break up, bats move near humans to agricultural and urban areas.

“Pathogen Spillover Driven by Rapid Changes in Bat Ecology,” published Nov. 16 in Nature and combines multiple datasets over 25 years. The data includes information on bat behavior, distributions, reproduction and food availability, along with records of climate, habitat loss and environmental conditions. The study predicts when Hendra virus — an often-fatal illness in humans — spills over from fruit bats to horses and then people.

The researchers found that in years when food was abundant in their natural habitats during winter months, bats emptied out of agricultural areas to feed in native forests, and away from human communities.

A second paper, “Ecological Conditions Predict the Intensity of Hendra Virus Excretion over Space and Time from Bat Reservoir Hosts,” published Oct. 30 in Ecology Letters, used data from the Nature study to reveal ecological conditions when bats excrete more or less virus.

While previous research has shown correlations between habitat loss and occurrence of pathogen spillover, these studies together reveal for the first time a mechanism for such events and provide a method to predict and prevent them.

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SARS-CoV-2, SARS-CoV-1, Nipah, Hendra and possibly Ebola are all examples of viruses that fatally spill from bats to humans, sometimes after transmission through an intermediate host. In humans, Hendra virus has a 57% fatality rate, and Nipah virus can be up to 100% fatal — though transmission in humans is inefficient.

“Right now, the world is focused on how we can stop the next pandemic,” said Raina Plowright, professor in the Department of Public and Ecosystem Health at Cornell University, and senior author of both studies. “Unfortunately, preserving or restoring nature is rarely part of the discussion. We’re hoping that this paper will bring prevention and nature-based solutions to the forefront of the conversation.”

Plowright and colleagues are investigating whether the basic mechanisms found in this study apply to other examples of pathogen spillover from wildlife to humans.

For the studies, the researchers developed datasets from 1996 to 2020 in subtropical Australia that described the locations and sizes of fruit bat populations, the landscapes where they foraged, climate and El Niño events, years when there were food shortages, bat reproductive rates, records of bat intakes into rehabilitation facilities, habitat loss in forests that provide nectar in winter, and years when flowering in existing winter forests occurred.

The scientists then created computer models (called Bayesian network models) to analyze the data, and they discovered two factors driving spillover: habitat loss pushing animals into agricultural areas and climate-induced food shortages. In years following an El Niño event (high temperatures in the Pacific Ocean), buds of trees that bats depend on for nectar failed to produce flowers in the subsequent winter, leading to a food shortage. Human destruction of forest habitat for farmland and urban development has left few forests that produce nectar for bats in winter.

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Due to food scarcity, large populations of bats split into smaller groups and moved to agricultural and urban areas, where weedy species and fig, mango and shade trees offered shelter and reliable but less nutritious food sources than nectar.

When stressed from lack of food, few bats successfully reared their young. According to the Ecology Letters paper, they also shed virus, possibly because they needed to conserve energy by directing it away from their immune systems. Also, the bats that had moved to novel winter habitats, such as agricultural areas, shed more virus than bats in traditional winter habitats.

In agricultural areas, pathogens may spread when urine and feces drop to the ground where horses are grazing, leading to Hendra virus infections. Horses act as an intermediary and occasionally spread the virus to people.

To their surprise, Plowright and colleagues discovered that when remaining stands of eucalyptus trees bloomed in winter, large numbers of bats flocked to these areas. During those flowering events, pathogen spillover completely ceased.

“We put these data into the network models and found that we could predict spillover clusters based on climate, the availability of food, and the location of bats,” said Plowright. “We show that when remaining habitat produces food, spillover stops, and therefore a sustainable way to stop these events could be to preserve and restore critical habitat.”

Since 2003, researchers have noticed a gradual dwindling of large nomadic roosts in favor of many smaller roosts in agricultural and urban areas, a five-fold increase over the study period. Bats are less frequently returning in large numbers to their shrinking native habitats. This could be because forests that provide nectar in winter have been extensively cleared.

Peggy Eby, a bat ecologist at the University of New South Wales, Australia, is the Nature paper’s first author. Co-authors include Alison Peel, a wildlife disease ecologist at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia, and Andrew Hoegh, a statistician at Montana State University. For the Ecology Letters paper, Daniel Becker, a biologist at the University of Oklahoma, and formerly a postdoctoral researcher at Montana State University, is the first author. Eby and Peel are also co-authors.

#Environment

[thewelllitweenie]

It's a fun twist of fate that something so keen on contact and ever so cute is also a made reservoir of zoonotic diseases, little friends like this carry hendra virus like it's not big deal.

Look at this baby’s face

[ilearnedthistodaysblog]

#1066 Why don’t bats get sick?

Why don’t bats get sick? Because their immune response doesn’t cause much inflammation, because they have proteins that stop the viruses leaving their cells, and because the viruses have evolved to live with them. Bats do get sick and some viruses are lethal to them. They also carry a lot of viruses that can jump to other animals. It is thought that Covid 19 jumped from bats to humans somewhere in China. There are also other viruses that make it to humans by going from bats via other animals. A Hendra virus made its way to humans by going via horses. Researchers have found over 130 different kinds of viruses living inside bats. Bats live in large colonies on the roofs of caves or in other dark places, and it is very easy for viruses to jump between them. Then the vats pass these viruses on in bodily fluids. So, if bats are hosts to so many viruses, why don’t they get sick? Well, they do. Rabies, for example, can kill bats. A rabies virus can go through a colony of bats and wipe out over half of them. However, the majority of viruses that are dangerous to us have no effect on bats. Why is that? There appear to be three reasons and the first reason is that bats are the only mammals that can fly. There are a few types of squirrels that can glide from tree to tree, and this could be the first step on the evolutionary ladder to flying, but bats are the only mammals that have sustained and controllable flight. They don’t fly in the same way as birds because their wing is a membrane that stretches over the five long fingers they have on their hand, while birds have a long arm and one finger. This wing formation gives them a lot more mobility than birds, but they have evolved to fly and can’t really walk. When they fly, they use a lot of muscle power because they have to flap about ten times a second to keep airborne. This causes their heart rate to go up to 1,000 beats per minute and their body temperature rises to 41℃. This high heart rate and high body temperature protect them against viruses. When we have a viral infection, our body raises our internal temperature, triggering a fever, to make our bodies inhospitable to the virus. This happens every time the bat flies. They have also evolved to keep their immune system from reacting. Because they fly so fast, they have a very high metabolism and that causes damage to their cells. When our cells are damaged, the body initiates an immune response and triggers inflammation in the cells. This is one of the things that make us sick. Bats cannot afford to have inflammation every time they fly, so they have evolved not to. Their immune response doesn’t trigger inflammation as readily as ours does, which means viruses don’t cause a harmful immune response, which means they don’t get sick. The second reason is that their cells produce proteins that stop the viruses from getting away. This protein is called tetherin and we produce it as well. It can stop viruses from entering a cell, it can stop viruses from replicating themselves, and it can stop the virus copy from leaving the cells. Our bodies produce two different types of tetherin proteins, which are able to stop a few different types of virus. Bats produce fifteen different types of tetherin proteins, which means they can stop and control a much larger number of viruses. The third reason, which may be somewhat conjecture, is that viruses have evolved to be less harmful to bats because they can use bats as a host and as a way to move to other species. The single goal of a virus is to reproduce its DNA. That is it. If a virus cannot reproduce, it will die out and disappear. If a virus can reproduce, it will spread and spread. That is evolution. It is counterproductive for a virus to kill its host because it becomes more difficult for that virus to get to a new host. This is true with bats as well. It makes far more sense for a virus to evolve to be able to survive in a bat but not make the bat sick, so that the bat can fly around and spread the virus to other species. And this is what I learned today. Photo by Erick Arce: https://www.pexels.com/photo/close-up-of-bat-feeding-on-flower-15915605/ Sources https://www.burnet.edu.au/knowledge-and-media/news-plus-updates/why-don-t-most-viruses-make-bats-sick https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/02/09/803543244/bats-carry-many-viruses-so-why-dont-they-get-sick https://www.bats.org.uk/about-bats/bats-and-disease/bats-and-viruses https://howthingsfly.si.edu/ask-an-explainer/how-do-bats-fly-differently-birds https://www.batcon.org/bats-vs-birds Read the full article

[zehub]

🧬 Fascinantes chauves-souris: comment tolèrent-elles des virus mortels pour les humains ?

Les chauves-souris ont fait la une des médias avec l'émergence du SARS-CoV-2 qui aurait pour origine l'un de leurs coronavirus. Ce n'est pas la première émergence imputable à ces mammifères volants. En effet, lors de l'émergence du premier SARS-CoV en 2002 et d'un coronavirus voisin le MERS-CoV, en 2012, le réservoir a été identifié parmi les chauves-souris. Au-delà des coronavirus, d'autres virus tels que les paramyxovirus Hendra et Nipah ont émergé en Asie touchant respectivement les chevaux et les porcs mais aussi les hommes pour les deux virus.

[average-dragon-enjoyer64]

you know how kids have really irrational fears, like quicksand and the sun burning out?

yeah, 5 year old me was fucking terrified of Hendra virus. I didn’t even have horses.

[labseraph]

Good news! We have ways to live together with fruit bats without the icky zoonotic viral sharing!

We just need to remember to prosper our neighbours and that includes bats and the rest of the ecosystem!

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2022/11/16/1136850711/an-elegant-way-to-stop-deadly-hendra-virus-spillovers-from-bats-to-horses-to-us

[yetanothersupernova]

Empathy

Design thinking is a reiterative and non-linear process (Stevens, 2023) that allows designers to problem-solve in creative ways. It typically consists of 5 stages; ‘empathise’, ‘define’, ‘ideate’, ‘prototype’, and ‘test’, with each phase targeting a specific area of the problem (Interactive Design Foundation, n.d.). This semester, we utilised the design thinking process to deconstruct and find a solution to a solitary wicked problem. Wicked problems are described as complex social issues, typically without a straightforward solution (Ritchey, 2011). We were given a short list of problems to choose from as a group, and we decided on exploring Hendra Virus.

The first several weeks of semester were primarily targeted towards introducing the class to collaborative learning. 

In Week 1, we participated in a silent exercise that assisted our understanding of the design process. Each student was required to illustrate the individual steps of making toast without the use of words or numbers. Once completed, the class split into two groups to reorder each image in silence. It was a simple task, but effective in introducing us to group contribution and separating design into individual stages. 

The second week consisted of randomised group allocation, which was solely based on our degrees, major/s, and skill sets. After the class was separated into groups, I was introduced to my own group members:

Lillian Mackaway

Robert Hall

Katherine Dowd

Astrid Goodley

After our group was assembled, we filled out a contract for collaboration to document each other’s contact details, as well as have an official document to ensure all members were productive and collaborative throughout the semester. Additionally, we set up Microsoft Teams to successfully communicate outside of class. Unfortunately, Katherine left the course in Week 3, and was ultimately replaced by Sean Pobie in Week 4.

During Week 3, the empathise phase of the design process began. We decided on the Hendra Virus WICKED problem, and made quick work of reframing its context to better understand the issue and who it impacts. Most of our initial efforts during class in Week 2 was put into researching hendra virus (HeV) to gain an understanding of where to progress.

Getting used to the group was particularly a challenge. With development in the early stages, most of us had limited input. Each of us had different learning styles, but we determined that open communication was the best way forward to ensure we’re all consistent with our understanding. 

REFERENCES:

Ritchey, T. (2011). Wicked Problems - Social Messes: Decision Support Modelling with Morphological Analysis. Springer Berlin Heidelberg.

Siang, T. (2009). What is Design Thinking? The Interaction Design Foundation; The Interaction Design Foundation. https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/topics/design-thinking

Stevens, E. (2023, April 19). The Key Principles and Steps of the Design Thinking Process. Career Foundry. https://careerfoundry.com/en/blog/ux-design/design-thinking-process/#:~:text=The%20Design%20Thinking%20process%20can%20be%20divided%20into%20five%20key,Ideate%2C%20Prototype%2C%20and%20Test.

[astridgoodoes]

Week 13 Blog

Design Thinking Innovation Blog

Final week of class and it was our time to present our 'Horse Health' application as well as all our research studied from the Hendra Virus to the class. We had a pre made script for all of us to follow so it would run as smoothly as possible and so everyone got the chance to present their findings.

It was great moment for all of us as we felt all our hard work had paid off in the end after all our group struggles with losing two group member during the semester.

It was taken well by Ben and the rest of the other peers, as well as adding a few touches before submission time, we were all very proud and happy of our final product.

[whatyoutaughtwasfear]

a fun thing: one of my current lecturers was the person to test the first suspected hendra virus sample in australia (ended up being positive) and he fucked up so bad he got the sample on the ceiling and all over the back of his head

[nedsecondline]

Why do bat viruses keep infecting people?

Why do bat viruses keep infecting people?

Food stress Specifically, the researchers found that clusters of Hendra virus spillovers occur following years in which the bats experience food stress. And these food shortages typically follow years with a strong El Niño, a climatic phenomenon in the tropical Pacific Ocean that is often associated with drought along eastern Australia. But if the trees the bats rely on for food during the winter…