An elegant way to stop deadly Hendra virus spillovers from bats to horses ... to us

PO1 William "Chip" Nagel Wouldn't it be lovely if your Granddaughter's Dr. Doolittle interest remained an interest in some way or another? At issue is not only Zoonotic Disease, viruse, but more importantly environments that support the nutritional needs of wild and domesticated animals so they stay healthy. It has been about land use - more precisely land abuse - for a very long time. We need to be much better stewards of the land, the critters that live on the land, and our own species.

PO1 William "Chip" Nagel
"Not quite 20 years ago, Raina Plowright stood in a forest in Australia's Northern Territory at dusk. She watched as hundreds of thousands of bats called little red flying foxes launched themselves into the air.

"The sky was [dark] with these huge bats taking off in this stream of animals across the landscape looking for nectar," Plowright says. "So just a deafening roar of bat sound, talking to each other, screeching at each other."

Plowright, a disease ecologist at Cornell University who studies pandemic prevention, was interested in bats because they carry a virus called Hendra. And while it's harmless to bats, they can pass it to horses through their feces and urine.

For equines it manifests as a nasty respiratory and neurological disease. They can develop a frothy nasal discharge, trouble breathing and odd behaviors, like drinking water constantly or throwing themselves against the wall of a stable. The virus kills three out of every four horses it infects. Over 100 horses have died from Hendra, though there are no known cases at the moment."...

Zoonoses are scary stuff - especially when the critters that carry them do not become ill from them. We do not seem to have seen much hanta virus around, thankfully, however, apparently in the 90s it was first discovered in mice in the four corner's region who it was learned carry it.
I have often wondered if covid is related to hanta virus - given similarities, and given that covid vaccines were tested on the Navajo tribe in the four corners. It was voluntary, but many people volunteered.
Monoclonal antibodies were also advised to be used on people who had covid which it was said highly reduced the severity - if given in time. Perhaps they work on a variety of virues (bacteria, germs . . . )?