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Disease ecology

A batty concept goes viral

Nature Ecology & Evolution volume 3, pages 1620–1621 (2019)Cite this article

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A field test suggests that orally ingestible, spreadable vaccines to combat rabies will transmit widely among vampire bats in the wild, offering a more humane — and effective — alternative to the bat culling practiced throughout Latin America today.

Vaccination represents one of the most successful public health advances of the twentieth century1. Zoonotic diseases, which transmit from animal reservoirs to human hosts, present a unique vaccination challenge because access to the primary source of human infection is limited. For wildlife zoonoses, direct vaccination of enough reservoir hosts to perceptibly impact transmission may be logistically impossible. Recent advances in the development of transmissible vaccines, which spread among unvaccinated hosts through natural contacts, offer an exciting potential solution to this logistical burden by requiring only a small initial reservoir population to be directly vaccinated2,3. Writing in Nature Ecology & Evolution, Bakker et al.4 explore the potential impact of spreadable vaccines to combat vampire bat rabies, a lethal viral zoonosis that imposes a significant public health and economic burden throughout Latin America. Using a unique combination of field experiments and modelling approaches, the authors demonstrate that spreadable vaccines offer a viable and effective alternative to the rabies control policy of vampire bat culling, which is currently practiced across the region.

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Fig. 1: Population-level susceptibility to rabies is elevated under culling versus spreadable vaccine interventions.

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  1. Department of Integrative Biology, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Cara E. Brook

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Correspondence to Cara E. Brook.

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Brook, C.E. A batty concept goes viral. Nat Ecol Evol 3, 1620–1621 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-019-1045-5

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