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Reservoir of diseases and prized game, a worried bat in New Caledonia

AFP, published on Saturday May 23, 2020 at 08:37

In New Caledonia, the dogfish, a large bat emblematic of the territory, remains a prized game by the population, despite the health risks highlighted with the coronavirus epidemic, and the identification in 2017 of a new disease associated with this flying mammal.

“We are not careful enough here, when the Covid-19 crisis came to remind us that the bat is a pathogenic reservoir”, reports a scientist, preferring to remain anonymous given the question of the health risks of the dogfish is sensitive in the archipelago.

On the Caillou, “there are people who chase the dogfish in taps, without gloves, risking being bitten or scratched. Afterwards, they are skinned and cooked without any more precaution,” he adds.

The archipelago has four species of fruit bat, three of which are endemic.

Also known as flying foxes, dogfish live in colonies in forest trees, sleeping upside down during the day and moving at night for feasts of fruit and floral nectar.

“They are nicknamed the gardeners of the forests because they play a crucial role in seed dispersal and pollination,” explains Malick Oedin, who is devoting his doctorate in biology to the bat – the learned name for bats.

– Regulated hunting –

In decline due to poaching and wild cats, fruit bats can only be hunted on the weekends of April in the northern and southern provinces but are hunted almost all year round in the Loyalty Islands.

“It is an animal like any other, we must stop scaring everyone”, storm Pierre Aubé, president of the federation of hunters, adding that no specific precautions are taken.

In 2016, his federation had however been asked to collect animals after the discovery, in the Nouméa Forest Park, of dogfish carrying antibodies to the Nipah virus.

Appeared in 1998 in Asia, this serious pathology, of which the bat is the host, caused several dozen deaths.

Investigations carried out at the time revealed that 30% of Caledonian dogfishes carried Nipah antibodies.

Tuesday on Radio Classique, Professor Didier Raoult said that in New Caledonia, “as they eat bats, there is a specific disease of bats (…) which probably spreads everywhere in Oceania” .

The territorial hospital center (CHT) has indeed highlighted a new disease, suspected of being transmitted by fruit bats, following work carried out in collaboration with the Institut Hospitalo-Universitaire de Marseille (IHU).

This zoonosis called hemolytic fever, which causes weight loss, fever and enlarged spleen, affected between 2012 and 2019 about fifteen people, four of whom died.

“All the patients, except one, had been in contact with fruit bats either hunting or cooking and most had eaten from three weeks to three months before the onset of symptoms,” said Doctor Julien Colot, from the CHT microbiology laboratory.

The multidisciplinary Caledonian scientific team to which he belongs will deepen research on modes of transmission, other potential reservoirs (pigs, rats) and extend the field of study to Vanuatu and Wallis and Futuna.

In Nouméa, the Institut Pasteur is also working on the sequencing of the genome of fruit bat leptospires.

“These do not have the capacity to infect men, but our work will nevertheless help to better describe human leptospirosis. Our samples will also allow us to broaden research on pathogenic risks, including the coronaviruses,” says Cyrille Goarant, the researcher in charge of the program.

This veterinarian by training, however, insists on the fact that this true “museum” of the virus that is the dogfish remains harmless to humans, “as long as we leave it alone in its natural place of life”.

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