“The bats themselves are not affected by Hendra virus,” said Baranowski. “However, they can pass the virus to horses, which pick up the virus by grazing in areas under trees where the bats now visit. Horses are the bridge, or amplifier, species between bats and humans. The virus replicates in horses to levels high enough to infect humans. So far, there have been somewhere around 100 documented cases of horses with Hendra virus but just a handful of human cases. Unfortunately, Hendra virus has proved fatal in more than half of those cases, and even when it’s not fatal, it still causes permanent neurological damage. It’s vital to get a handle on how and why this is happening in these early stages and learn what we can do to prevent it from getting worse.”
There are many layers to understanding how a virus jumps for one species to another, from animal ecology to disease ecology, microbiology, and immunology. The researchers refer to this as the “Swiss cheese model,”…