AFP

An unvaccinated teacher at an elementary school in California spread the coronavirus to at least 26 other people, including 12 students in their classroom, a new study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said Friday.

The health agency said the case highlights the importance of vaccinating school staff in order to protect young children who are not yet eligible for vaccines, as schools reopen amid a new nationwide surge driven by the ultra-contagious Delta variant.

The CDC said the incident took place in Marin County, a suburb of San Francisco.

The teacher, who reported attending social functions from May 13-16, became symptomatic on May 19 but did not take a Covid test until May 21, initially believing the symptoms were due to allergies. 

“On occasion during this time, the teacher read aloud unmasked to the class despite school requirements to mask while indoors,” the study said.

In the days that followed, among the teacher’s 24 students, all ineligible for vaccination because they are under 12, 22 received tests and 12 were found to be positive.

Eight out of 10 students in the front two rows tested positive — an attack rate of 80 percent — as well as three out of 14 in the three back rows.

The school required students to mask, each student’s desk was set six feet apart from the next, windows were open on both sides of the classroom, and a high-efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filter was placed in front of the class white board.

Six students in a separate grade also tested positive.

It wasn’t clear how the virus spread between the two classes, with researchers presuming an interaction occurred at school. 

However, genetic sequencing of available samples confirmed they were all part of the same outbreak, and identified the Delta variant as responsible.

Eight additional cases were identified among parents and siblings of children in the two grades. Among four parents infected, three were fully vaccinated.

Twenty-two of the 27 total infected people (81 percent) reported symptoms, the most frequently reported were fever, followed by cough, headache and sore throat.

No one involved in the outbreak was hospitalized.

The CDC said the outbreak was likely underestimated because all testing was voluntary.

“The outbreak’s attack rate highlights the Delta variant’s increased transmissibility and potential for rapid spread, especially in unvaccinated populations such as schoolchildren too young for vaccination,” said the report’s authors.

– What works –

In addition to vaccinating school staff, they stressed the need for multi-pronged mitigation strategies, including using masks, distancing and ventilation, and staying home when sick.

A second CDC study also released Friday was held up by the agency’s director Rochelle Walensky as an example of what happens when best practices are followed.

It showed that during the winter pandemic peak, case rates among children and adolescents in Los Angeles County schools were nearly 3.5 times lower than rates in the surrounding community.

“We know what works. Now let us unify together to follow these steps to ensure fundamentally that our children and our future are safe,” said Walensky at a press briefing.

Storm Ida has strengthened into a hurricane as it barrels through the Caribbean toward the US Gulf Coast and could hit the southern United States as a major hurricane, forecasters said Friday. 

“Ida has strengthened to a hurricane” with maximum sustained winds of 75 miles (120 kilometers) per hour, the National Hurricane Center (NHC) said, adding Cuba was already experiencing tropical storm conditions. 

The Cuban government had issued hurricane warnings earlier Friday in the Isle of Youth and several western provinces as Ida gathered strength as it bore down on the island. 

The NHC said “life-threatening heavy rains, flash flooding and mudslides” were expected to hit western Cuba, Jamaica and the Cayman Islands on Friday.  

The center warned that Ida “is expected to be a dangerous major hurricane when it reaches the northern Gulf Coast on Sunday.” 

A hurricane watch is in effect in New Orleans — which was devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 — with “an increasing risk of dangerous hurricane-force winds beginning Sunday along the portions of the coasts of Louisiana and Mississippi,” the NHC said. 

“Potentially devastating wind damage could occur where the core of Ida moves onshore,” it added, noting it is likely to produce heavy rainfall and “considerable” flooding from southeast Louisiana to coastal Mississippi and Alabama. 

New Orleans officials issued a mandatory evacuation order for areas outside the levee system that protects the low-lying city.

“Now is the time for Louisianans to get prepared,” tweeted the state’s governor John Bel Edwards, calling on residents to “make sure you and your family are ready for whatever comes.”

US atmospheric scientist Matthew Cappucci tweeted that “at this point it’s reasonable for coastal Louisiana to prepare for the potential of Category 4+ impacts.”  

That level is the second-highest on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane wind scale. 

“A major hurricane is basically a lock. And, given there aren’t many ‘outs’ for this storm to fail, it’s tough to not see it overachieving.” 

Last week, a rare tropical storm struck the US northeastern seaboard, knocking out power to thousands of Americans, uprooting trees, and bringing record rainfall. 

Scientists have warned of an rise in the number of powerful cyclones as the ocean surface warms due to climate change, posing an increasing threat to the world’s coastal communities. 

Louisiana is frequently hit by major storms. New Orleans remains traumatized from Katrina in 2005, which flooded 80 percent of the city and killed more than 1,800 people. 

An unvaccinated teacher at an elementary school in California spread the Delta variant of the coronavirus to at least 26 other people, including 12 students in their classroom, a new study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said Friday.

The health agency said the case highlights the importance of vaccinating school staff in order to protect young children who are not yet eligible for vaccines, as schools reopen amid a new nationwide surge driven by the ultra-contagious Delta variant.

The CDC said the incident took place in Marin County, a suburb of San Francisco.

The teacher, who reported attending social functions from May 13-16, became symptomatic on May 19 but did not take a Covid test until May 21, initially believing the symptoms were due to allergies. 

“On occasion during this time, the teacher read aloud unmasked to the class despite school requirements to mask while indoors,” the study said.

In the days that followed, among the teacher’s 24 students, all ineligible for vaccination because they are under 12, 22 received tests and 12 were found to be positive.

Eight out of 10 students in the front two rows tested positive — an attack rate of 80 percent — as well as three out of 14 in the three back rows.

The school required students to mask, each student’s desk was set six feet apart from the next, windows were open on both sides of the classroom, and a high-efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filter was placed in front of the class white board.

Six students in a separate grade also tested positive.

It wasn’t clear how the virus spread between the two classes, with researchers presuming an interaction occurred at school. 

However, genetic sequencing of available samples confirmed they were all part of the same outbreak, and identified the ultra contagious Delta variant as responsible.

Eight additional cases were identified among parents and siblings of children in the two grades. Among four parents infected, three were fully vaccinated.

Twenty-two of the 27 total infected people (81 percent) reported symptoms, the most frequently reported were fever, followed by cough, headache and sore throat.

No one involved in the outbreak was hospitalized.

The CDC said the outbreak was likely underestimated because all testing was voluntary.

“The outbreak’s attack rate highlights the Delta variant’s increased transmissibility and potential for rapid spread, especially in unvaccinated populations such as schoolchildren too young for vaccination,” said the report’s authors.

In addition to vaccinating eligible people, they stressed the need for multi pronged mitigation strategies, including using masks, distancing and ventilation, and staying home when sick.

As the Delta variant continues its global surge, experts are questioning whether the long-held goal of achieving herd immunity from Covid-19 through vaccination is still viable.

Herd immunity is achieved when a certain threshold of the global population has either been inoculated against a pathogen or has recovered from infection.

But whether or not it is achievable with Covid-19, with the regular emergence of more infectious strains, is up for debate.

“If the question is ‘will vaccination alone allow us to dampen and control the pandemic?’ the answer is: no,” epidemiologist Mircea Sofonea told AFP.

He said herd immunity hinged on two basic factors.

“That’s the intrinsic infectiousness of the virus and the efficacy of vaccines to protect against infection. And at the moment, that efficacy isn’t there.”

Delta has shown to be roughly 60 percent more transmissible than the Alpha variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and up to twice as infectious as the original strain that emerged in late 2019. 

The more effective the virus becomes at infecting people, the higher the herd immunity threshold becomes.

“Theoretically, it’s a very simple calculation to make,” said epidemiologist Antoine Flahault. 

For the original virus, which had a reproduction rate between zero and three — meaning each infected person infects up to three others — herd immunity could have been achieved with around 66 percent of people immunised, Flahault told AFP.

“But if the reproduction rate is eight, as with Delta, that puts us closer to 90 percent,” he said.

Were vaccines 100 percent effective at stopping Delta infections, that 90 percent could conceivably be possible. Unfortunately, they aren’t. 

– Waning immunity? –

According to data published this week by US authorities, the efficacy of the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines at preventing infection has fallen from 91 percent to 66 percent since Delta became the dominant variant.

And studies have shown that the vaccine efficacy against infection with Delta falls over time — one of the reasons why several countries are now readying for an autumn third shot, or “booster”, vaccination campaign.

With all this taken into account, absent other health measures such as mask-wearing or social distancing, Sofonea said it would take more than 100 percent of people to be vaccinated in order to guarantee transmissions end — an obvious impossibility. 

“The Delta variant will still infect people who have been vaccinated and that does mean that anyone who’s still unvaccinated, at some point, will meet the virus,” Andrew Pollard, director of Britain’s Oxford Vaccine Group, told lawmakers this month.

– ‘Mythical’ –

But even if, as Pollard termed it, the “mythical” aim of herd immunity is no longer in play, experts stressed that getting vaccinated remained paramount.

As with vaccines against other, now-endemic diseases such as measles and influenza, the Covid vaccines offer excellent protection against severe illness.

“What scientists are recommending is to get the maximum number of people protected” through vaccination, said Flahault. 

Eventually, of course, all pandemics end. 

Sofonea said it would still be possible that Covid would become another endemic disease over time, “just not with vaccines alone”.

He envisioned a near future where “masks and social distancing continue in certain regions” in order to limit transmission and, ultimately, severe illness.

“During the AIDS pandemic, when scientists said we needed to wear condoms, lots of people said: ‘OK, we’ll do it for a while’,” said Flahault.

“And in the end they kept on using them. It could well be that we will continue using masks in enclosed spaces and on transport for quite some time.”

A new approach using existing medicines to prevent malaria has been shown to reduce severe cases of the parasitic disease among infants by more than 70 percent in sub-Saharan Africa, according to a study.

The “dramatic” results, published in the New England Journal of Medicine on Wednesday, came from combining booster shots of an antimalarial vaccine ahead of the rainy season together with preventative drugs.

Malaria kills more than 400,000 people a year, the vast majority under the age of five.

The paper’s senior author Brian Greenwood of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine told AFP that members of the team were in touch with the World Health Organization about updating its recommendations.

The RTS,S vaccine, made by British pharmaceutical company GSK, was developed more than 20 years ago but by itself is not highly effective, said Greenwood.

Prior research has shown the vaccine’s protection wanes over time and it offers around 30 percent efficacy over a period of three to four years.

Since malaria is highly seasonal in the Sahel and sub-Sahel region, the team wanted to test whether giving boosters before each year’s rainy season, when mosquito populations peak, would improve outcomes.

The trial followed around 6,000 children aged five to 17 months from Burkina Faso and Mali over the course of three years.

The children were split into three groups: those who received only the anti-malarial drugs sulfadoxine–pyrimethamine and amodiaquine; those who received only the RTS,S vaccine; and those who received a combination.

The combination was the most effective intervention, reducing malaria cases by 63 percent, hospitalizations by 71 percent, and deaths by 73 percent compared to the drugs alone.

“That was pretty dramatic,” said Greenwood — stressing that these numbers are on top of the impact of the already effective drugs, not compared to no medicine, which would have been unethical to test.

He estimated that the combination of the booster vaccine doses and antimalarial drugs reduced hospitalizations and deaths by 90 percent compared to no intervention.

Children initially receive three doses of the vaccine to prime their systems, then a booster every year. It is based on a particle that trains the immune system against the Plasmodium falciparum parasite.

The anti-malarial drugs are given for three days a month every four months.

Greenwood said the study showed the value of developing plans in accordance with local epidemiological conditions — in this case administering vaccines ahead of peak season, instead of during times when there was no transmission and their impact would fade.

“Like a lot of these things it’s sort of common sense but nobody has actually put this into practice, to see whether it actually would work,” he said.

“Hopefully this may get implemented in several countries and save lots of people’s lives.”

Up to 95 percent of Earth’s ocean surface will have changed by the end of the century unless humanity reins in its carbon emissions, according to research published Thursday. 

Ocean surface climates, defined by surface water temperature, acidity and the concentration of the mineral aragonite — which many marine animals use to form bones and shell — support the vast majority of sea life. 

The world’s seas have absorbed around a third of all carbon pollution produced since the Industrial Revolution.

But with atmospheric CO2 levels increasing at a rate unprecedented in at least three million years, there are fears that ocean surface climates may become less hospitable to the species it hosts. 

US-based researchers wanted to see what effect carbon pollution has already had on ocean surface since the mid-18th century. They also projected the impact of emissions through to 2100.

To do so, they modelled global ocean climates across three time periods: the early 19th century (1795-1834); the late 20th century (1965-2004); and the late 21st century (2065-2014). 

They then ran the models through two emissions scenarios. The first — known as RCP4.5 — envisions a peak in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 followed by a slow decrease across the rest of the century.

The second scenario — RCP8.5 — is a “business as usual” approach, where emissions continue to rise throughout the next 80 years.

Writing in the journal Nature Scientific Reports, the researchers found that under the RCP4.5 scenario, 36 percent of the ocean surface conditions present throughout the 20th century are likely to disappear by 2100.

Under the high emissions scenario, that figure rises to 95 percent. 

The team also found that while ocean surface climates showed little sign of change during the 20th century, by 2100, up to 82 percent of ocean surface may experience climates not seen in recent history.

These include seas that are hotter, more acidic and that contain fewer minerals vital for sea life to grow.

Lead study author Katie Lotterhos, from Northeastern University’s Marine Science Center, said the ocean’s changing composition due to carbon pollution would likely impact all surface species.

“Species that are narrowly adapted to a climate that is disappearing will have to adapt to different conditions,” she told AFP.

“A climate in which the temperature and chemistry of the water is common today will be rare or absent in the future.”

– Diminishing options –

While surface species have so far been able to move around in order to avoid anomalously warm or acidic areas of ocean, Thursday’s study suggests that in the future their options may be limited due to near-uniform warming and acidification.

“Already, many marine species have shifted their ranges in response to warmer waters,” said Lotterhos. 

“The communities of species that are found in one area will continue to shift and change rapidly over the coming decades.”

She said that governments needed to monitor future shifting habits in marine surface species. 

But, ultimately, the world’s oceans need the emissions driving their heating and acidification to cease.

“Without (emissions) mitigation, novel and disappearing climates in the sea surface will be widespread around the globe by 2100,” said Lotterhos.

A village in the Austrian Alps known for its family-friendly ski resort has been forced to adapt to waning snow due to climate change, turning to a new downhill sport — mountain biking.

Bikers as young as three ride over landscaped jumps and curved forest trails, breathing new life into Sankt Corona am Wechsel, around an hour’s drive from Vienna, and offering a model for other struggling resorts.

“We used to be a 100 percent winter destination. Now, we have to think about climate change, and summers are booming,” said Karl Morgenbesser, who runs the adventure park in Sankt Corona.

As the coronavirus pandemic increases enthusiasm for outdoor activities, many Austrians hope mountain biking and other summer sports can make up for winter losses in the Alpine nation, where skiing accounts for around three percent of the GDP. 

Nearly a month of snow cover has been lost in the Alps at low and medium altitude in half a century, according to a March study published in The Cryosphere scientific journal.

And a recent report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) found that in the Alps the snow cover will decrease in areas below 1,500 metres (5,000 feet) throughout the 21st century.

– Lift pulls bikers up –

Situated at an altitude of nearly 900 metres, Sankt Corona dismantled its winter infrastructure in 2014 after years of losses as annual visitor numbers fell to 25,000 from 70,000 some 20 years earlier.

A rollercoaster-like summer toboggan and climbing space soon opened, but the 400-resident village’s fortunes truly turned when it devised a network of mountain-biking trails.

While most mountain biking destinations boast steep slopes, Sankt Corona’s undulating trails suit professionals as well as children relying on training wheels, and now draw about 130,000 visitors per season.

“We really like to come here as a family,” said 33-year-old Lisa Goeschl, who used to ski in Sankt Corona as a child and whose husband is an avid mountain biker.

“I think summer is a bigger hit with people (than winter) because there are so many activities on offer.”

This June, a new T-bar lift — which pulls bikers up the slope — opened, as a shuttle bus service taking riders to the top could no longer keep up with demand.

“I wanted the T-bar lift to be as simple as possible,” Simon Hanl, a local mountain biker who conceived the system to pull up the bikers, told AFP.

– ‘Inspirational’ –

Former snowboard instructor Morgenbesser hosts delegations from some of the world’s biggest ski resorts, curious to see how the tiny, low-lying village has adapted so well to a possibly snowless future. 

“It’s extremely inspirational,” said Marlene Krug, in charge of bike development in Saalbach, Austria, which frequently hosts mountain biking world cup races, and has now modelled part of its kids’ area after Sankt Corona’s.

Ski resorts first reacted to the lack of snow by investing to make it artificially. 

But temperatures have become so warm that resorts across the Alps will have to look into other options, says Robert Steiger, a University of Innsbruck expert on the impacts of climate change on tourism.  

“Diversifying into summer is necessary for all of them, and mountain biking is definitely something everyone’s interested in,” Steiger says.

Streetlights — particularly those that use white light-emitting diodes (LEDs) — not only disrupt insect behavior but are also a culprit behind their declining numbers, a new study carried out in southern England showed Wednesday.

Artificial lights at night had been identified as a possible factor behind falling insect populations around the world, but the topic had been under-researched.

To address the question, scientists compared 26 roadside sites consisting of either hedgerows or grass verges that were lit by streetlights, against an equal number of nearly identical sites that were unlit.

They also examined a site with one unlit and two lit sections, all of which were similar in their vegetation.

The team chose moth caterpillars as a proxy for nocturnal insects more broadly, because they remain within a few meters of where they hatched during the larval stage of their lives, before they acquire the ability to fly.

The team either struck the hedges with sticks so that the caterpillars fell out, or swept the grass with nets to pick them up.

The results were eye-opening, with a 47 percent reduction in insect population at the hedgerow sites and 37 percent reduction at the roadside grassy areas.

“We were really quite taken aback by just how stark it was,” lead author Douglas Boyes, of the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, told AFP, adding the team had expected a more modest decline of around 10 percent.

“We consider it most likely that it’s due to females, mums, not laying eggs in these areas,” he said. 

The lighting also disturbed their feeding behavior: when the team weighed the caterpillars, they found that those in the lighted areas were heavier.

Boyes said the team interpreted that as the caterpillars not knowing how to respond to the unfamiliar situation that runs counter to the conditions they evolved in over millions of years, and feeding more as a result to rush through their development.

The team found that the disruption was most pronounced in areas lit by LED lights as opposed to high-pressure sodium (HPS) lamps or older low-pressure sodium (LPS) lamps, both of which produce a yellow-orange glow that is less like sunlight.

LED lamps have grown more popular in recent years because of their superior energy efficiency.

The paper acknowledged the effect of street lighting is localized and a “minor contributor” to declining insect numbers, with other important factors including urbanization and destruction of their habitats, intensive agriculture, pollution and climate change.

But even localized reductions can have cascading consequences for the wider ecosystem, resulting in less food for the birds and bats that prey upon insects.

Moreover, “there are really quite accessible solutions,” said Boyes — like applying filters to change the lamps’ color, or adding shields so that the light shines only on the road, not insect habitats.

Five tonnes of fish and crustaceans have washed ashore over the past 10 days at Spain’s Mar Menor, once a lagoon paradise that is slowly dying from agricultural pollution. 

The sparkling saltwaters have spat out millions of dead or dying sea creatures on to sandy beaches which have long drawn tourists to the southeast.

Images of dying fish forcing their heads above the surface, gasping for oxygen alongside baskets piled high with countless dead creatures have traumatised the Murcia region, raising urgent questions about the Mar Menor’s future.

On Monday, regional officials said they had removed 4.5-5.0 tonnes of remains but huge numbers of sea creatures are still dying. 

“The worst-ever wildlife death toll in the Mar Menor is not yet over,” the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) tweeted on Wednesday.

“It’s a terrible situation,” said Pedro Garcia, director of regional conservation organisation ANSE, who feared the death toll could be twice that given by the authorities. 

Beneath the calm of one of Europe’s largest saltwater lagoons — 135 square kilometres (52 square miles) separated from the Mediterranean by a 22-kilometre sandbar — a toxic storm has been brewing as a result of years of nutrient pollution from intensive agriculture.

“I haven’t been able to swim here for three years with this horrible stench,” a woman on the beach told Spain’s RTVE public television. 

– Turning a blind eye? –

Experts say the fish suffocated due to a lack of oxygen caused by hundreds of tonnes of nitrates from fertilisers leaking into the waters.

For years, runoff water loaded with nitrates has entered the lagoon causing a vast bloom of algae which, as it dies and decomposes, decreases oxygen levels in the depths.

Known as eutrophication, the phenomenon is an environmental hazard that causes aquatic ecosystems to collapse due to a lack of oxygen.

Visiting the lagoon on Wednesday, Environment Minister Teresa Ribera accused the regional government of turning a blind eye to farming irregularities in the Campo de Cartagena, a vast area of intensive agriculture that has grown tenfold over the past 40 years.

“There is no room for complacency,” she told reporters, indicating that 8,000 hectares of land lacked “adequate irrigation rights” and were “illegally extracting water or using a quantity far above their allocation”. 

But agricultural groups feel they are being unjustly targeted. 

“They are attacking a sector that scrupulously complies with all (environmental) legislation,” Vicente Carrion, regional head of the COAG farmers’ association, told AFP. 

– ‘Very damaged landscape’ – 

However, for Murcia’s association of biologists, there is absolutely no doubt that the nitrate-loaded runoff water “explains the ongoing eutrophication crisis which has caused such high animal mortality, the terrible stench and the cloudiness of the lagoon,” it said in a statement. 

It is the second such episode in less than two years although this has been the worst by far with the last incident in October 2019 causing the deaths of around three tonnes of marine life. 

ANSE’s Gracia says that although the nitrate runoff is the main issue, it is not the only problem.

The crisis is exacerbated by “the excessive number of marinas, destruction of the coastline by urban development and by the large quantity of mining sediment” entering the water.

“It’s a very damaged landscape,” he said. 

The mid-August heatwave also did not help Mar Menor’s sealife. 

According to Spain’s Institute of Oceanography, eutrophication “reduces its capacity to resist disruptions like those caused by the thermal stress of a heatwave”.

In the fictional links he drew between immortal vampires and bats, Dracula creator Bram Stoker may have had one thing right. 

“Maybe it’s all in the blood,” says Emma Teeling, a geneticist studying the exceptional longevity of bats in the hope of discovering benefits for humans.

The University College Dublin researcher works with the charity Bretagne Vivante to study bats living in rural churches and schools in Brittany, western France.  

“We’re taking a little bit of blood, but rather than us being the vampires to the bats we’re making them give us their secrets,” she says.

Those secrets are tantalising. 

Bats not only live longer than other animals of their size, they also stay healthy longer and can harbour pathogens like Ebola or coronaviruses without getting sick. 

Teeling, who outlined her research to AFP in an interview reproduced here in edited form, focuses on long-lived Greater Mouse-eared bats.

The aim is to discover the key to longer, healthier lives for people.   

“I firmly believe it lies in studying bats,” she says.

– What’s so special about bats? –

Typically in nature there is a pattern — nearly a law — that small things live very fast and die young as a consequence of a really fast metabolism. 

Bats are unique, they are some of the smallest of all mammals, yet they can live for an extraordinarily long time. They seem to have evolved mechanisms to slow down the ageing process.

It’s not eternal youth — everything dies and ageing has to catch up with you, but the rate of ageing is much slower in bats, their health span is much longer.

Think of a centenarian who is really healthy until the last few weeks of their life. That’s what we want and it’s what the bats have.

– How do you extract their secret? –

Nobody knew what was happening to bats as they age.

The only way you age a bat is to look at the bones in their fingers, if the joints are not yet fused, that bat is still a baby, once they’re fused it is an adult. 

But since 2010 Bretagne Vivante has put a little microchip like you would a dog or a cat, it’s called a pit tag, under the skin of these bats when they are babies. 

Every year we come back to these roosts where the females give birth and we catch the entire colony, we take a little bit of wing, a little bit of blood, and we go back to my lab in Ireland and we look at what has changed as they age, tracking a few biomarkers of ageing. 

– What are you looking for? –

We look at these things called telomeres: on the end of every one of your chromosomes in your cells you have these protective caps — like the bumper on a car — and every time your cells replicate, it gets shorter and shorter. 

They get really short, the cell should self-destruct but sometimes it stays around and becomes old, potentially driving the ageing process.

But in the longest-lived bats like Greater Mouse-eared bats, the telomeres do not shorten with age. They can protect their DNA. 

We sequenced genes from young, middle-aged and older bats and what we found was extraordinary — they increase their ability to repair their DNA with age and repair the damage that living causes. Ours decreases.

As we age, we get arthritis, we suffer from inflammation, the bats don’t seem to do this and the question is how?

So we found that they repair damage to their DNA and they are also able to modulate their immune response, keeping it balanced between antiviral and anti-inflammatory responses. 

When you look at Covid-19 for example, what kills somebody is this over-excited immune response. In Dublin, we did an experiment looking at antiviral and anti-inflammatory cytokines and found that if a human with a bat’s immune profile was hospitalised they wouldn’t end up on a ventilator. If it is the other way around, so more like a mouse, they end up on a ventilator.

We share the same genes as bats, with slight tweaks and modifications. Imagine if we find the little controlling gene that regulates these effects, we could then make a drug to mimic it in humans. 

– How long will it take? –

I would have said 10 years, but look how fast everything is going now. 

People are really interested in looking at bats to find answers, there’s been a huge speed up.

We sequenced the genome, that was the first step, then we have this field data and we’re working with labs all around the world who are developing the cellular tools required.

We have to keep going and believe it’s possible.