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Big @batsgoviral week! In @PNASNews and @ScienceAdvances we test how to prevent zoonotic #spillover by interrupting virus transmission in bat reservoirs. Short story: culls didn’t reduce spillover but altered rabies spatial spread; transmissible vaccines may be a solution. A 🧵. 
First culling. Vampire bats are poisoned throughout Latin America to reduce blood feeding on humans and livestock and in hopes of preventing uniformly lethal rabies infections. Whether culls reduce rabies spillover is still controversial even after ~50 years of use.
We studied a 2 year bat cull in southern Peru where >21,000 bats were treated with a spreadable poison #vampiricide. This region suffered >1000 rabies outbreaks from 2003-2019 making a rare & statistically powerful case study to test whether bat culls reduce viral spillover.
