people have been exploring low-cost methods for helping gachis keep bats away from their clay pots. A simple screen made of woven bamboo scraps, costing about ten cents, can be placed around a tapping wound and its clay pot, fencing the bats out. That’s a simple fix, and probably more humane than passing a law against harvesting date-palm sap. On the scientific side, Luby told me, there are crucial unanswered questions about Nipah virus. How does it maintain itself in the bat population? Why does it spill over when it does? Is it readily capable of human-to-human transmission, or just under special circumstances? Has it emerged recently, a new pathogen, or is it something that’s been killing Bangadeshis, unnoticed, for millennia?
Those questions lead to another. How have changes to Bangladesh’s landscape, and the density of people upon it, affected the fruit bats, the virus they carry, and the likelihood of spillover? In other words: What’s new in Nipah ecology? For more a more eloquent answer to that, Luby said, you could talk with Jon Epstein.
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Eloquence is good but field time is better. I left Dhaka with Jon Epstein the next morning, headed west toward the river crossing that would take us into the southwestern Bangladesh lowlands.
Epstein is a veterinary disease ecologist, based in New York. He was employed at the time by an organization called Wildlife Trust, under its Consortium for Conservation Medicine (the same organization as Aleksei Chmura, and more recently rebranded as EcoHealth Alliance). In addition to his DVM, Epstein has a master’s in public health and a lot of experience handling big Asian bats. He worked with Paul Chua in Malaysia, capturing flying foxes amid the coastal mangroves, sometimes while chest-deep in seawater. He led the team that found evidence of Nipah among flying foxes in India, after the first outbreak there, and was part of a multinational group that identified bats as the reservoir of the SARS virus in China. He’s a large sturdy fellow with a crew cut and lozenge glasses, looking like a former high school quarterback grown fortyish and serious. He was in Bangladesh, not for the first time, to gather data toward understanding when, where, and how the Indian flying fox carries and sheds Nipah.
He brought along Jim Desmond, another American veterinarian, newly recruited to the organization, whom Epstein would train in the particular delicacies of searching for Nipah virus in bats as big as crows. The fourth member of our party was Arif Islam, also a veterinarian, one of very few in Bangladesh who works with wildlife and zoonotic diseases, and the only member of our group who spoke fluent Bangla. Arif was crucial because he could draw blood from a bat’s brachial artery, negotiate with local officials, and order curried fish for us in a local restaurant.
It was almost 9 a.m. by the time we cleared the traffic of Dhaka, where the busses grind against one another like chummy elephants and the green motorbike taxis dodge through the gaps, seeming ever at peril of getting squashed. Finally the road opened. We rolled westward toward the river, relieved to be away. Behind us, the low sun shone feebly through the smog of the city, orange as a bloodied yolk.
We made the ferry crossing into Faridpur District—dry season, the Padma River was low—and proceeded on a two-lane between the rice paddies. We stopped in Faridpur city to pick up more personnel, a pair of field assistants named Pitu and Gofur, with special skills. Both were small men, as compact and agile as jockeys, expert climbers and bat catchers who had worked intermittently with Epstein for several years. Their bat-catching expertise came from an earlier career in poaching, but now they were on the side of the angels. With them aboard, we turned south, snacking on oranges and spicy cracker mix along the way. We eased through small towns clogged with rickshaws and busses and motorbikes; down here in the southwest, I noticed few private cars. One community seemed to specialize in the quarrying, bagging, and shipping of sand, a resource available in abundance. It was transplanting time for the new rice crop, and we could see men and women bent double, digging the dark green shoots from their thick nursery patches along the river bottoms, bundling them, moving them, replanting them carefully in flooded paddies. On drier ground grew small patches of other crops—corn, beans, grain—and the occasional cluster of banana trees or coconut palms. Drier ground, though, was becoming more scarce