The virus hunter

Your donation supports our high-quality, inspiring and commercial-free programming. Other Ways to Give. Connect with Our Team. PBS Passport. Leadership Circle. Gift Planning. Corporate Support. Recognizing Your Generosity. Fauci: The Virus Hunter. Watch on PBS App. Suggested Show. Most Recent. Fauci: The Virus Hunter Specials. Epstein remembers his first visit to Bangladesh, in To scout a suitably massive bat colony roosting in treetops, he recruited two local bat poachers named Pitu and Gofur hunting bats is illegal in Bangladesh, but some Bangladeshis still eat bat meat.

Mission accomplished, Pitu and Gofur sat down to their lunches, watching with amusement as Epstein and a colleague set about extending volleyball-like nets on foot aluminum poles to trap the fruit bats. Because the bats were flying high above the lush treetops, the nets needed to be lashed to the upper branches.

So his teammate a former tree surgeon with a background in ecology assembled ropes and personal-safety equipment, then hoisted the nets and himself into the canopy, a proc-ess that takes more than an hour at its most efficient. Pitu and Gofur laughed at the elaborate procedure. In Bangladesh today, Epstein has trained a local field team — including Pitu, Gofur and two veterinarians — in the latest bat surveillance protocols.

The team traps bats; gently collects blood samples and throat, urinary and rectal swabs; does wing punch biopsies, for sophisticated molecular screening of pathogens and bat genetics; then releases the bats unharmed. They place the bat into a calming cotton pillowcase suspended on a branch or a rope strung between the trees. They further immobilize it with anesthesia delivered through a portable miniature respirator mask and tank. They have 15 minutes to collect samples and implant a microchip identifier.

Then they feed the bat mango juice to restore its fluids and energy before gingerly releasing it. Epstein and his team will not know if any of the bats they have handled carry the virus until lab analyses are completed weeks later. No effort is made to destroy infected bats. The real risk lies in human behavior, not the fact that bats carry a particular virus. One cluster involved an infected spiritual leader who spread the virus by sharing a pipe during a religious ceremony.

Though these villages often are remote, Epstein and his team have sampled bats just three hours outside Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh and the ninth-largest city in the world.

This year, a handful of Nipah cases reached Dhaka for the first time, Epstein says. Learning more about zoonotic pathogens in their natural hosts will help scientists predict and prevent the next pandemic, contend Epstein and his colleagues at EcoHealth Alliance, which is dedicated to the twin goals of protecting public health and safeguarding ecosystems.

Most, if not all, human infectious diseases arise from pathogens humans share with wild or domestic animals. The domestication of livestock, which started about 10, years ago, eventually led to the emergence of measles.

Blocking a pandemic is not straightforward work. It looks especially carefully at activities that bring humans and animals into close contact, where cross-species transmission is most likely to occur. The traditional public health model is to wait for an outbreak to occur and then respond. Sophisticated computer modeling is crunching field and lab data from animals and microbes to predict how human activities might influence outbreak risks and suggest possible solutions.

Last year, for example, Epstein and his colleagues uncovered the near-perfect conditions for a Nipah epidemic at the original outbreak site in Malaysia. A 30,pig factory farm was bordered by a mango orchard, attracting fruit bats, including Pteropus vampyrus, which can eat half their body weight in fruit daily.

The key to the outbreak: multiple spillover events from bats, coupled with the large size of the farm. After the first spillover from bats, the infection should have run its course in about 60 days, leaving the exposed pigs immune to future infections, Epstein says.

But the factory farming method created a smoldering viral burn by continually introducing immunologically naive piglets which had been sequestered in a separate nursery area into the general pig population, while bats continued to shed virus into the pens. In Bangladesh, infectious-disease experts tracked the virus to Nipah-laden bat saliva, urine and feces found in raw date palm sap, a popular beverage harvested from trees like maple syrup, and sold fresh door to door within hours of being collected.

We can only hope that big pharma will enter the scene and will put more people onto this subject. GWIN: Several weeks after Hilgenfeld returned from China, a colleague in Wuhan sent samples of the novel coronavirus to Germany, where a lab was finally able to test his compound—and it worked.

This molecule could stop the virus from growing in human cells in a petri dish. So it has to be developed into a drug. By then, the worst of this outbreak will be far behind us, and it may no longer be profitable for drug companies to pursue. But Hilgenfeld says governments should invest in developing drugs like these for other reasons. For instance, the office where I'm speaking now has two doors, because if one is blocked by fire, I still must have a second one to get out.

So the fire in front of the door of my office is much less likely than the next coronavirus outbreak will hit the world. We know that. And we know it's coming. But people, they tend to forget unpleasant events.

And so that must change. The attitude must change. We must be aware of the danger. We have easy-to-read explanations on the pandemic as well as some unusual takes, such as what an astronaut has learned from social isolation, and what people used to use before the invention of toilet paper.

And of course we encourage you to visit the CDC website for the most up-to-date information on how to stay safe—and keep others safe—during this crisis. Our editor is Ibby Caputo. Our fact-checker is Michelle Harris. Hansdale Hsu composed our theme music and engineers our episodes. They really did an amazing job helping us get this episode off the ground. This podcast is a production of National Geographic Partners. Whitney Johnson is the director of visuals and immersive experiences.

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