Skim the questions before the recording begins to play. Underline the keywords. Think of synonyms for those keywords. For example the first sentence you need to complete in the quiz contains the keyword epidemic.
epidemic: pandemic/ outbreak/ eruption
Write those synonyms on your question paper and then listen out for them when the recording begins.
This lesson is about bats and their ability to spread diseases . The original is here.
Listen to the recording and use no more than TWO WORDS ONLY or no more than ONE WORD ONLY and a number to complete the sentences.
- For many previous epidemics, bats have been ______.
- It is reasonable to assume that bats contain so many diseases because there are ______ of them.
- The patients in the forest showed terrible signs, including ______ migraines.
- All of the victims were ______ during the night by bats.
- Streiker had a ______ recollection of learning a foreign language in school.
Answers, transcript and clues below the image.
- patient zero
- 1500 species
- unbelievable
- bitten
- vague
What If We Could Stop A Virus At Its Animal Source?
When the latest coronavirus erupted in the city of Wuhan late last year, many scientists turned their attention to bats. Experts suspect that bats could be the likely hosts. COVID-19 likely came from bats. And, actually, bats have been patient zero for a lot of viral outbreaks.
DANIEL STREICKER: Ebola virus, Nipah virus, Hendra virus, SARS and, likely, this new coronavirus SARS, too. ZOMORODI: That’s ecologist Daniel Streicker.
STREICKER: It’s maybe not unexpected that bats have that number of viruses just given the number of bat species that there are in the world. There’s over 1,500 species, so it kind of makes sense that they should have some virus that jump into people. ZOMORODI: Daniel studies how viruses travel from animals to humans, specifically from bats to people.
STREICKER: Yeah, absolutely. There’s intense interest in knowing whether there is something about the immune system of bats or even, like, the life history or ecology of bats which somehow makes viruses that, if they’re in people, become more pathogenic.
ZOMORODI: Daniel started focusing on bats back in 2006. He tells his story from the TEDMED stage.
STREICKER: And that was when I first heard about an outbreak of mysterious illness that was happening in the Amazon rainforest of Peru. The people that were getting sick from this illness, they had horrifying symptoms – nightmarish. They had unbelievable headaches. They couldn’t eat or drink. Some of them were even hallucinating, confused and aggressive. The most tragic part of all was that many of the victims were children. And of all of those that got sick, none survived.
It turned out that what was killing these people was a virus, but it wasn’t Ebola. It wasn’t Zika. It wasn’t even some new virus never before seen by science. These people were dying of an ancient killer, one that we’ve known about for centuries. They were dying of rabies. And what all of them had in common was that as they slept, they had been bitten by the only mammal that lives exclusively on a diet of blood, the vampire bat.
ZOMORODI: I mean, when I hear that, that is absolutely terrifying. I mean, what was your reaction when you first heard about this? What did you think?
STREICKER: It did surprise me in the sense that I knew that vampire bat rabies was a thing that happened in the Amazon. But at that point, I didn’t think of it as a disease that can enter into a community and then kill 10 or 20 children within the course of about a month. So that really changed my thinking on it and made me realize there’s something going on here, and that was what I wanted to work out.
STREICKER: So as a first-year graduate student with a vague memory of my high school Spanish class, I jumped onto a plane and flew off to Peru, looking for vampire bats. You see; all we had to do was show up at a village and ask around. Who’s been getting bitten by a bat lately? And people raised their hands because in these communities, getting bitten by a bat is an everyday occurrence – happens every day. And so all we had to do was go to the right house, open up a net and show up at night and wait until the bats tried to fly in and feed on human blood.
ZOMORODI: Wait. OK, so wait. Bats just fly in when people are sleeping and feed on them? Like, people don’t feel them?
STREICKER: Right. So the way that people get bitten is literally as horrifying as it sounds. It’s bats entering their houses in the night and biting them. Usually, bites are on the head or the toes, sometimes on the fingers. And their saliva has anticoagulants in it, so the blood just continues to flow. And so they’re not really sucking blood, rather just lapping it up as it flows out of the people that they’ve bitten. And it’s quite shocking. But you can ask people, and they never seem to wake up when this happens.
STREICKER: And partly, it’s that the bats seem quite good at picking out people that are really deep in sleep, and they probably do that by listening to breathing patterns. So they can work out who’s really well asleep and then sneak up to them in a very stealthy way, make a small wound which doesn’t cause too much pain and then just lap up the blood.
ZOMORODI: Clever little things, huh? STREICKER: They are supremely well-adapted to a lifestyle of feeding on blood, yes.
STREICKER: Since we were working all night long, I had plenty of time to think about how I might actually solve this problem. And it stood out to me that there were really two burning questions. The first was that we know that people are bitten all the time, but rabies outbreaks aren’t happening all the time – every couple of years, maybe even every decade. So if we could somehow anticipate when and where the next outbreak would be, that would be a real opportunity, meaning we could vaccinate people ahead of time before anybody starts dying.
But the other side of that coin is that vaccination is really just a Band-Aid. At the end of the day, no matter how many cows, how many people we vaccinate, we’re still going to have exactly the same amount of rabies up there in the bats. So my second question was this. Could we somehow cut the virus off at its source? If we could somehow reduce the amount of rabies in the bats themselves, then that would be a real game changer.
STREICKER: Maybe we could stop the virus from hitching a ride along with the bats. ZOMORODI: Vaccinate the bats.
STREICKER: So in this case we have an oral vaccine which is embedded into a gel. And you spread that on to one or more bats, and you release them. Then the other bats will lick the first bat that you put your vaccine on because they’re really social and they groom each other. They’re then consuming the vaccine, and when they consume the vaccine, they get protected against the disease. And so this is potentially a way to spread your vaccine to a much larger number of individuals than you actually had to go out and catch manually.
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