So what we're doing here
today is we're going over some critical safety and field sampling information that
we're going to be using in our expedition to Colombia this summer. We're going to be
going to a bunch of different sites
to catch bats. Bats are really,
really interesting to study when
you're looking at how climate and the environment impact different disease
reservoirs. We collect bats and
we take samples from bats, so we're teaching them the best practices in order for them to be safe and also for the
wildlife species that we're handling
to be safe. We don't want to be
exposed to their pathogens, but also we don't want
to infect wildlife. What we're doing in
this training is showing our team how
to set up mist nets, how to properly collect bats out of these
mist nets, how to do laboratory
sampling of different individuals and some examples of
field safety. So things like how
to belay someone. We're also showing
different laboratory and field safety
protocols. And what you
want is, you want this top part to be just above your eyebrow line. Vampire bats feed
only on blood. Because they feed on blood,
they have to bite the animals
that they feed upon. This makes them very, very good at
transmitting rabies to different species
such as cattle, dogs, humans, chickens,
things like that. We know that many
infectious diseases, especially
emerging diseases, come from wildlife. So we want to
understand, what are the ingredients
necessary to see another COVID
pandemic, for example. What happened that COVID had
everything in place to emerge as an epidemic, an
outbreak, and then becoming a pandemic. So we want to understand how viruses
circulate in wildlife, how wildlife transmits
their pathogens to other wildlife species, or to livestock,
or to people.
