A bat-infested Thai cave shows it’s hard to banish virus risk

At the Khao Chong Phran cave in Ratchaburi, buckets of bat dung is mined, packaged and sold as fertiliser for US$2,400

Bats contain the highest proportion of mammalian viruses that are likely to infect humans, according to a 2017 study

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A vendor selling bats at the Tomohon Extreme Meat market in Indonesia. Photo: AFP

Published: 3:21pm, 21 Feb 2020Updated: 5:16pm, 21 Feb 2020

Every Saturday morning, a dozen or so villagers from a province about 60 miles (96.56km) west of Bangkok creep into a bat-festooned cave to scrape up the precious faecal deposits of its flourishing inhabitants.

In three hours, they can amass as many as 500 buckets of bat dung. The guano is packaged and sold at an adjacent temple as fertiliser, reaping more than 75,000 baht (US$2,400). Just 1 kilogram (2.2 pounds) of the nutrient-rich material can fetch as much as the daily minimum wage.

Elsewhere in Asia and Micronesia, meat from bats is sometimes sold in markets or cooked at home after being caught in the wild. Although consumption is rare and limited to certain communities, it’s considered a local delicacy in the Pacific island-nation of Palau, and areas of Indonesia, where meat from other mammals is scarce.

With growing awareness of bat-borne viruses – from Nipah to coronaviruses linked to severe acute respiratory syndrome and the new pneumonia-causing Covid-19 disease that has killed more than 2,000 people in China – human contact with the ancient flying mammal and their excreta is drawing closer scrutiny.

“Anything to do with bats, in theory, can expose yourself to potential viral transmission because we know bats carry so many viruses,” said Linfa Wang, who heads the emerging infectious disease programme at Duke-National University of Singapore Medical School.

Bats contain the highest proportion of mammalian viruses that are likely to infect humans, according to research published in 2017 by disease ecologist Peter Daszak in the scientific journal Nature.