Bruce's parents had formed the Wayne Wildlife Trust under the focus of wildlife conservation. The Trust's modern work now focused on three overlapping areas of health: for animals, humans, and the environment. One of its aims was to mitigate the prospect of the spread of diseases, finding threats among wildlife disease hotspots.
Deforestation was one of the pillars of the Trust's work. Changes in land use posed a threat for the intermingling of displaced wild animals to infect encroaching humans.
Another of the Trust's programs centered on bat conservation. This species occupied a key role: a fifth of all species of mammals, second in number only to rodents.
The Trust fostered public health initiatives to educate people to change their behaviors. The aim was to try mitigating such interactions, reducing the risk. Bats were one of the frontlines in the battle against the emergence of future pandemic threats.
Through the Trust's work, Bruce had learned bats were an important part of the ecosystem. They ate fruit from trees, dispersing the seeds, sowing them for new trees to grow. Bats carried out the same function as bees with pollen from flowers, propagating plant life. Bats also were a natural means of pest control, preying on insects, which were pests to crops cultivated by humans.
Bruce was visiting the campus of Gotham University to attend a wildlife conservation conference. He'd committed to offer closing remarks following the keynote speeches and stay on for the cocktail party.
The esteemed zoologist, Dr. Kirk Langstrom, was to give an overview of the research work on Project CONSERVE, funded by the Trust. Dr. Langstrom, the project lead, represented Gotham University among a consortium of others.
The other keynote speaker preceding Kirk on the conference's agenda was Dr. Bian Fu of the Kunming Institute of Zoology in China. Dr. Bian Fu one of the fellow team members on Project CONSERVE, her research focused on zoonoses.
"Why are bats such good viral hosts?" opened Dr. Bian from the lectern to a full house in the university's main hall.
"Bats are the common denominator of most recent discoveries of viruses with pandemic potential. Whether it's new strains of Ebola, or outbreaks of Marburg virus - in each instance, bats were the source.
"Flying foxes hosted the Nipah virus, which infected the sap of date palms. Bats played a hand in MERS, whereby camels ate fruit which bats carrying the virus had eaten, spilling over into humans. The SARS outbreak originated in my home province, via palm civets and bats.
"One theory," she continued, "is because bats are the only mammals capable of flight. Every day, their metabolism and body temperature rise to the level of what would be a fever in humans. For other animals, when a virus invades, their metabolism rises, and with it, the immune response to combat the intrusion. When flying, a bat's body emulates this effect compared to when they're otherwise active. The increase is 15 to 16 times their regular metabolic rate when not flying. This is twice as much as birds in flight, seven times as much as rodents running to exhaustion.
"Bats can offer refuge to a virus, without killing the bat, allowing the virus the opportunity to spread to other species. Bats host viruses as if they were symbiotic. Bats don't become sick, as you'd expect of a dog carrying rabies, affecting the dog and any humans it bites. When faced with a virus, the marginal amount a bat's metabolism needs to rise to pose an immune response is far less.
"The immune systems of bats are well-evolved, a 50-million-year-old order of mammals. In contrast to humans, we developed a couple hundred thousand years ago.
"Imagine you - as a human - are sick with a fever. Were you to encounter another virus, your body is already alert, and wouldn't notice the extra response. It's the same for bats. But rather than bats feeling sick, it's like comparing the heat from the exertion of exercise to a fever - one form of feeling hot is welcome, the other not. Bats need to alert their immune system less to viruses, and compared to humans going for a run, their metabolic rate is even higher when flying. Imagine how much more energy you would need to take flight than to run? By contrast, our bodies try to heat out the virus when we have a fever, even at the expense of feeling altogether unpleasant.
