The Hidden Disease Risks of Modern Housing Development in Rural Africa

by Todd Price, University of Arkansas
November 19, 2024

Tamika Lunn went to Kenya looking for bats. Her task, as a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of U of A biologist Kristian Forbes, was to catch bats to understand if, when and why they carried viruses. A spillover of a bat virus to humans could lead to the next global outbreak, like the COVID-19 pandemic.

Lunn noticed she had better luck finding bats in modern structures, with triangular roofs and made with finished materials, than in traditional ones, which had flat roofs and mud walls.

“I didn’t suspect this until I was physically in the country,” Lunn said.

That observation led to a systematic study of where bats in Kenya prefer to roost. The results were published in the latest issue of the Ecological Society of America journal, Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. Lunn, the lead author and now an assistant professor at the University of Georgia, completed the work while working in the lab of Forbes, the study’s senior author.

Modern-style buildings were five times more likely to be occupied by free-tail bats, one of the most common species in the area. And buildings with triangular roofs, whether built with modern or traditional materials, were more than nine times more likely to have bats than flat-roofed buildings.

Keep reading: https://news.uark.edu/articles/72905/the-hidden-disease-risks-of-modern-housing-development-in-rural-africa

Read the Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment paper: https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/fee.2795