School of Biodiversity, One Health & Veterinary Medicine

Most new diseases of humans and livestock and some of the oldest threats to our health and livelihood originate from wildlife. Anticipating how diseases jump between species requires knowing what determines patterns of disease in wildlife hosts, the ecological factors that create opportunities for transmission between species and how pathogens evolve in new species. Knowledge gaps in each of these areas make it impossible to optimize disease control. Bats are a key group associated with diseases like SARS and Ebola, for which our knowledge is especially poor. This proposal focuses on vampire bats, whose blood-feeding lifestyle creates nightly opportunities for disease transmission to humans and livestock. The goals of this fellowship are a) to use genetic data to identify what geographic factors affect the spread of rabies, b) to quantify the burden of vampire bat rabies in livestock, c) to collect field data on rabies transmission in wild vampire bats in Peru to develop models that can dictate how vaccination or culling of bats should be directed to prevent livestock and human rabies and e) to use new genetic tools to track the spread of undiscovered viruses between vampire bats and livestock.

First published: 13 July 2015