Scientists in the US and Australia have laid out in detail the steps that cause Hendra virus, which causes a rare and sometimes deadly respiratory and neurological infection, to spillover into humans. Using a dataset that spans decades, the researchers demonstrated how climate change and deforestation have shifted the behavior of bats in Australia such that the animals spend more time in urban and agricultural settings when food is scarce, bringing them into proximity to intermediate hosts that can infect humans.
The findings are presented in a paper published in Nature yesterday (November 16). The authors write that the model they’ve built with the data can now predict future outbreaks up to two years in advance, and offer several suggestions for how to prevent them.
“It’s just an exceptional piece of work,” Cara Brook, a disease ecologist at the University of Chicago who did not participate in the study, tells ...
