Don't Eat Bats

And yet, some hungry children did ...

Dozens dead in the DRC after three children ate a bat. I will guess it was a Straw Colored fruit bat, full grown they’re between half and three quarters of a pound, so they’ve got some meat on them.

Having a bat involved immediately puts Ebola and Marburg at the top of the list of possible culprits, but the testing has shown neither of them. Fatality rate in this far corner of a third world country has been around 10%. Western medical care would cut into that, so long as the patient load was manageable.

Bush meat feeding urban areas is bad news, it’s too much for the wildlife, unlike resident hunter gatherer consumption, and we take risks like this. The big fear has always been an aerosol transmission of one of these hemorrhagic fevers. Currently transmission for the very dangerous Ebola and slightly less virulent Marburg are always bodily fluids. If one of these things becomes pneumonic it’ll downgrade COVID19 to a warmup act. We wouldn’t get hit as hard as we were in the mid-1300s, when the black plague took a third of everyone alive from India to Iceland, but it’ll be more than enough to cause a collapse.

Once again we face the plot of The Peripheral in real life.