Impact case studies
Tackling vampire bat rabies transmission
Rabies is regarded globally as the most lethal of the infectious diseases and left untreated leads to almost-certain death in people who are unvaccinated. In most of the world, most human cases are caused by dogs, but vampire bats are the primary source in Amazonian countries such as Peru, Columbia and Brazil. Vampire bat-transmitted rabies remains a chronic cause of livestock mortality and requires large, recurring investments in diagnostics, livestock vaccination and bat population management.
The threat is also expanding as both the bats and the virus spread into new areas, likely due to the interaction between climate change and novel sources of food and shelter that are incidentally provided to bats by human activities.
Since 2007, CVR researchers have been focusing on how land use change, particularly livestock intensification, affects bat ecology and rabies transmission, how conventional control methods like bat population poisoning can backfire, and the development of models to forecast spillover risk. They are also pioneering innovative wildlife vaccination approaches to manage rabies within bat populations.
Bats, Rabies and COVID-19: can we stop animal-borne diseases?
In a video for the Royal Society, Professor Daniel Streicker explain his team’s work developing and applying powerful new tools to study rabies and other viruses with zoonotic potential.
Outputs
Research outputs
- Viana, M.*, Benavides, J.A.*, Broos, A., Ibañez, D., Niño, R., Bone, J., da Silva Filipe, A., Orton, R., Valderrama Bazan, W., Matthiopoulos, J., Streicker, D.G. (2023, *co-first authors) Effects of culling vampire bats on the spatial spread and spillover of rabies virus Science Advances
- Griffiths, M.E., Meza, D.K., Haydon, D & Streicker, D.G. (2023) Inferring the disruption of rabies circulation in vampire bat populations using a betaherpesvirus-vectored transmissible vaccine Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA
- Bakker, K.M., Rocke, T.E., Osorio, J.E., Tello, C., Carrera, C., Valderrama, W., Shiva, C., Falcon, N., & Streicker, D.G. (2019) Fluorescent biomarkers demonstrate prospects for self-spreading vaccines to control disease transmission in wild bats. Nature Ecology & Evolution doi: 10.1038/s41559-019-1032-x
- Streicker, D.G., Winternitz, J., Satterfield, D., Condori-Condori, R.E., Broos, A., Tello, C., Recuenco, S., Velasco-Villa, A., Altizer, S., Valderrama, W. (2016) Host-pathogen evolutionary signatures reveal dynamics and future invasions of vampire bat rabies Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 10.1073/pnas.1606587113