Chinese Fuck With Bats: Bats Fuck Chinese, and Us Too

(Wuhan Virus Outbreak proves we should leave the BATs alone, especially the Cave Ones.)

When I was growing up, in a little island town called Mawgyun in the Irrawaddy Delta of Burma, the fruit bats or flying foxes were all over the town. Thousands and thousands of them bats flying out at dusk just after sunset to feed on the fruit trees in the jungle beyond the town or the mango and guava and Jack-fruit groves on the town's outskirt and flying back into the town to sleep hanging upside down at dawn just before the sunrise.

What I still remember is they were so discrete flying in and out we saw them only when they were  asleep hanging on the huge trees when we children woke up and came outside to go to school or to play. There was a couple of huge koke-ko trees by the wide road just outside of our house and the bats were all hanging upside down quietly on the high branches during the days.

When I was growing up we boys were quite rough and brutal as any semi-rural boy would be in that part of  primitive world. Civil war was raging around us and most of the adults like my grown-up cousins and uncles from the town's People Militia (Pyi-thu-sit) were armed with ubiquitous .303 Lee-Enfield rifles ready to fight the insurgents from the Communist villages or the Karen ethnic villages.

We boys were also armed with lethal slingshots made out of water-buffalo horns and we spent a lot of time making large marble-sized balls, as slingshot's lethal ammo, made out of sticky mud from the riverbanks.

Most weekends we gangs of 9-10 years-old boys ventured out into the fruit gardens on the outskirts of our little town and hunted birds and little animals and barbequed them as we were hungry all the time while growing up half-starve in Socialist Burma. Sometimes we even had deadly slingshot battles between the rival gangs.

But during rainy days and occasional fighting between the militia and insurgents we were forced to stay inside or  not venture out far from our homes. Then were the times we directed our anger and frustrations, from staying inside, at the innocent bats on the huge Koke-ko trees nearby.

We basically despised Koke-ko trees and the bloody bats on them. The trees are like tamarind trees but much, much larger and their tamarin-liked fruits are ugly and black and sticky like road-tar, and useless. We have deliciously-fruity mango and guava and Jack-fruit trees all over our town and we like them and the bats like them too and their half-eaten fruits still hanging on the trees always repulsed us with disgust.

And also there were horror stories of the gems these bats carried around and their supposedly poisonous meat. Despite all those bad things about bats we still bothered them when we were forced to stay close to our homes. We would try to shoot them  down with our slingshots while they were sleeping. We usually had a sort of game to decide who was best shot and thus able to bring down the first bat.

One idle weekend we started our bat-shooting game in the morning, but those critters were gripping so hard on the branches with their sharp claws they wouldn't drop down onto the ground even they were absolutely dead by so many headshots for hours.

Only in the late afternoon one eventually dropped down when the branch it was holding was broken by our shots. The dead bat was so ugly and its dead face with gaping mouth was like an angry dog. As we normally put our preys into fire and ate one of the older boys suggested we eat it. 

We initially refused to do that after seeing the fleas and some large ticks on it. But he kept on daring us and, the hot-blooded boys we were, we finally accepted his dare.

So we started making a fire and threw the bat raw and whole into the fire without skinning it like we normally do with other little furry animals like field rats. In case of rats we cut off the hands and feet and tail, hang it by the necks from a low branch, cut the skin around the neck, and then pulled the whole skin down exposing the smooth and skinless body whole. Then we cut open its belly and pulled the insides out and then roasted the body on the skewer by fire.

But none of us boys dared to do that or even touch that dead bat. We just picked it up with a long stick and threw straight into the burning fire. Then suddenly one of my older cousins, he was about 20-years old,  showed up and once he saw what we were doing he was really angry and basically hit me on the face with such a force I fell down on the dirt ground.

He then angrily told us what happened to one of his friends when they were about our ages. They did exactly same as us and the stupid one who ate the roast-bat got real sick and eventually died. He and the rest were unharmed as they refused to eat that bat.

And that was the last time I fucked with them bats. I stayed away from them. In the wild I never went under a tree occupied by a colony of bats. At the zoos I always avoided their enclosures. My lesson was if one fucks with bats one will be fucked by bats, that simple.

But those so-called Chinese scientists like Dr. Zhou Peng and Dr. Tian Junhua and late Huang Yanling and many others from the now-notorious Wuhan Institute of Virology tried to fuck with the cave-bats, the worst of the bat kinds, and the cave-bats have fucked them back and the rest of the world with their COVID-19 Corona Virus also-known-as the Chinese Virus or the Wuhan Virus.

Where did bats get the virus from?

How did coronavirus start? Where did bats get the virus from and how did it spread to humans? Despite the conspiracy theories you're hearing, or the misinformation that's spreading on social media, it's clear that this coronavirus came from wildlife.

By looking at the genome of SARS-CoV-2 — the virus that causes COVID-19 — it is clear it has signatures that are closely related to other viruses that are present in wildlife, said evolutionary biologist Jemma Geoghegan of the University of Otago.

"There is a virus in bats, as well as a virus in pangolins, that shares similarities with the new virus that has appeared in humans," said Dr Geoghegan, who studies the emergence and evolution of viruses.

We don't need to manufacture this virus, it exists in nature as it is, said veterinarian and environmental scientist Hume Field from the EcoHealth Alliance, who was also part of the original team that determined the SARS-CoV-1 virus, which caused the SARS outbreak in China in 2003, originated in bats.

"From a scientific point of view, that argument that it's a manufactured virus has been totally discredited," Dr Field said. But when it comes to how exactly this new coronavirus jumped the species barrier to us, and from which animal, that's a lot less clear.

So let's take a look at what scientists do and do not know about the origins of this coronavirus. We know that a lot of the early cases of COVID-19 were connected to a live animal market, or wet market, in the Chinese city of Wuhan. However, we don't know this market was the actual source of the virus or the place where it jumped the species barrier from another animal to humans.

"To be honest, I'm not sure if we'll ever know that because the wet market has now been cleared and been decontaminated," Dr Geoghegan said. Scientists never had the opportunity to sample the animals to see whether there were viruses in the live animals being sold at the market.

Dying cell (greenish) swamped and killed by COVID19 (pinkish).

Having these samples would have helped to better understand SARS-CoV-2, Dr Geoghegan said. "Obviously if it was from a live animal market, then we can use this as an argument to prevent this from happening by having fewer of these live animal markets around."

Research over recent years has revealed bats are hosts to quite "an impressive array of" coronaviruses. Part of this is because there are so many bat species, they make up about a fifth of the world's mammalian species. "[Due to] the sheer diversity of bats around the world," said infectious disease ecologist David Hayman from Massey University, "they have a diverse range of viruses."

But it's also about the way bats live. "They're really like humans in cities," Professor Hayman said. "They form very dense colonies with thousands in a small space. So that's ideal for infections to be able to transmit from one individual to another."

Social distancing is not a behaviour seen in bat colonies. This also suggests bats are most likely a reservoir host for many coronaviruses, meaning the viruses are living and reproducing in the bats, but not necessarily causing any disease in the animals.

SARS-CoV-2 is 96 per cent similar genetically to a bat coronavirus. And both SARS-CoV-1, the virus which caused the SARS outbreak in 2003, and MERS‐CoV, the virus that causes MERS, are found in bats. Both these viruses jumped to humans via an intermediate, in the case of SARS via civet cats, and with MERS a couple of times via camels.

"It's likely that this new SARS virus has a similar route," Dr Geoghegan said. How did coronavirus make its way from bats to humans? "Human interactions with live animals make a host jump more likely to occur," Dr Geoghegan said, and live animal markets are a massive source of these interactions.

"These locations can act as mixing pots, and you can have animals defecating, urinating, they're stressed maybe, you're bringing together the different species that may not be together," Professor Hayman said. "And if hand hygiene and stuff like that isn't optimal, then this is where you have the opportunity for an infection to go from one species to another, and that includes humans."

Dr Field said live animal markets are an absolute recipe for that kind of thing to happen. "You've got this mixing of species and this potential mixing of viruses in these animals that are under stress, sick and dying as they've gone from their wild environment to the market."

Related posts at following links:
Patient Zreo Huang Yanling from Wuhan Institute of Virology is dead and cremated?
Dr. Zhou "Wuhan Virus" Peng was trained by Australia's CSIRO.