“Scientists have developed a rabies vaccine for vampire bats that spreads naturally through grooming. The vaccine is delivered via a gel applied to one bat’s fur. When others groom it, they ingest the gel and gain immunity. Laboratory studies show this method could effectively protect entire colonies,” reports The Doomslayer.
For farmers in Latin America, vampire bats live up to their dark reputation. Their bites weaken cows and open the way for infections. Worst of all, the rabies they sometimes carry can kill livestock and, occasionally, people as well. Now scientists have developed an innovative way to vaccinate the bats against the virus—by making use of their extraordinary fondness of mutual grooming.
In a study published as a biorXiv preprint on 12 June, researchers showed that after they applied an oral vaccine in the form of a thick gel to the fur of some members of a colony of common vampire bats (Desmodus rotundus), mutual licking helped spread the vaccine rapidly through the population….
Vampire bats cause an average of 450 rabies outbreaks annually in cattle in Central and South America, costing farmers an estimated $50 million, and they can spread the fatal virus to pigs and horses as well. Small farmers are especially hard hit….To ward off the threat, people have culled vampire bats by setting fire to caves or tree hollows where they live, often killing ecologically beneficial fruit- and insect-eating bat species in the process…..The need for a rabies vaccine for bats is likely to become more urgent…climate change is helping the vampire bats move northward; they have already been found just 50 kilometers from the United States’ southern border.
Scientists have developed a new, more effective mosquito repellent you can easily apply to your skin, but the FDA will keep it from being sold in the U.S. for years, just as the FDA blocks the most effective sunscreens, which are available in Europe, from being sold in America.
In other good news, the African nation of Guinea recently eradicated sleeping sickness, a parasitic disease carried by the tsetse fly that causes irreversible brain damage, aggressiveness, psychosis, and then death, if left untreated.
Niger recently became the first nation in Africa to eliminate river blindness, a disease spread by flies that breed near rivers. Those flies carry long thin parasitic worms that burrow in a victim’s skin.
