THE SPECIAL PACKAGES arrived in January at the Bangkok laboratory of a virus expert named Supaporn Wacharapluesadee. They contained tubes of saliva and mucus from five people who had just landed at the city’s main airport from Wuhan, China. Days earlier, Chinese authorities had announced a cluster of mysterious pneumonia cases in Wuhan. Officials in Thailand, a top destination for Chinese tourists, rushed nurses to airports to screen arriving passengers for fevers or coughs. Health officials feared the culprit might be something nobody had ever seen.
“They asked me, could I detect the unknown or not?” says Wacharapluesadee.
There are as many as 1.6 million viruses we know nothing about lurking in mammals and birds, and as many as half might have the potential to jump to humans and infect us. That’s an estimate, based on mathematical models, but the threat is clear. Six out 10 infectious diseases that strike us come from animals. The list includes HIV/AIDS, Ebola, MERS, SARS, and in all probability COVID-19.
Scientists identified the pathogens responsible for most recent pandemics only after they started killing people. Researchers such as Wacharapluesadee say that’s too late. She’s part of a dogged international effort to find deadly viruses before they find us, in hopes of stopping lethal outbreaks.
Those hopes have sent Wacharapluesadee into forests, remote villages, and musk-scented caves across Thailand. Wearing thick leather gloves and holding fine-mesh, long-handled nets, she and her colleagues captured 932 bats in the early 2000s, drew their blood, released the animals, and returned to the lab to test for rabies-causing lyssaviruses. She then turned her attention to the deadly Nipah virus, which crossed from pigs to humans in Malaysia and Singapore in 1998. She tested thousands of samples of saliva, urine, and blood from 12 bat species and discovered worrisome signatures of Nipah infection in the sociable, pointy-eared Lyle’s flying fox.
Most bats are protected in Thailand, but their fresh blood is treasured as an aphrodisiac. Wacharapluesadee’s research led her to warn in a 2006 letter to a journal called Clinical Infectious Diseases: “Drinking bat blood may be hazardous to your health.
GALLERY
