Webinar presenter John Griffin answered a number of your questions after his presentation, Responding to Calls and Concerns about Bats. Here are just a few of his responses.

Audience Question: Given everything that you just shared should people who work with animals then get the rabies vaccine? 

John Griffin: If you’re working with wildlife, yes. Get the pre-exposure vaccine to reduce the risk of exposure. There’s also the post-exposure and you still have to get it. But it’s important to do in terms of human safety if you’re working with wildlife.

Audience Question: Are there other zoonotic diseases that bats carry other than rabies that we should also be concerned about? 

John Griffin: Well, there was a concern about COVID-19, obviously. But the real concern about COVID-19 is they haven’t had a bat that they found with it. The concern was that there would be a human-to-bat transmission, that there would be sort of reverse zoonoses there, and then that would cause that virus to sort of explode through populations of bats and either significantly impact them or increase the likelihood of more transmission with human population coming back and its spillover, but that hasn’t really proven to be and that taking precautions in the way that ——- ——– and other conservation organizations are talking about is making the difference on that being aware, and taking the kind of PPE precautions to make sure you’re not inadvertently transmitting it. Histoplasmosis was a concern, is a concern. If you’ve got, if you’re potentially in a demographic that’s more susceptible to that, it’s a fungus that grows on guano. It can grow on bird guano or large accumulations of it outside. It can also do it on bat guano. It’s a good substrate for it, but only if it’s really moist. So that was those are the three major ones, rabies being the primary one.

Click Here to Watch a Recording of Responding to Calls and Concerns about Bats.