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Comment by hirenj | Hacker News Reader

Fun fact: Coronavirus also recognises sialic acids (but they need an extra acetylation on top).

Fun fact 2: Sialic acids are important for protecting your gut / balancing the microbiome.

Fun fact 3: Bats apparently have a much simpler microbiome (less weight, better flying), and can tolerate low levels of coronavirus infection.

I would bet the closest non-flying relative of a bat would get respiratory infections too.

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> Fun fact: Coronavirus also recognises sialic acids (but they need an extra acetylation on top).

What do you mean by "recognises" here? Is sialic acid something that helps the coronavirus or something that hinders it?

The article describes how influenza viruses (not coronaviruses) use sialic acid to bind to the upper respiratory tract.

Edit: a letter.

I may have been a little hasty, which is to say COVID-19 might not recognise sialic acids. Which puts a bit of a dent in my theory.

But Sialic acids are really interesting!

Bats really do seem to serve as viral reservoirs at an exceptionally high rate[1]. SARS, MERS, coronavirus and ebola all likely seem to have originated in bats.

One thing we may have to consider is a policy of bat eradication. At least in populated areas. It would have some ecological consequences, but the risk of mass pandemic probably outweighs that cost.

[1]https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=JnBpAgAAQBAJ&oi=...

You could also replace "bats" by "humans" in your sentence ;)

Getting people to stop eating bats would get us 95% of the benefit for 5% the effort.

Removing bats would create millionary damages in agriculture and would hit specially hard the tropical fruitculture. Kiling millions from famine and collapsing the ecology of tropical rainforests just to avoid a disease with a 96% probability of surviving is a really bad idea.

What's your opinion on Kudzu or Himalayan Blackberry as erosion control devices?

I don't often say this outright, but that's a dumb idea.

"Insectivorous bats in particular are especially helpful to farmers, as they control populations of agricultural pests... It has been estimated that bats save the agricultural industry of the United States anywhere from $3.7 billion to $53 billion per year in pesticides and damage to crops."[1]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat#Economics

> It has been estimated that bats save the agricultural industry of the United States anywhere from $3.7 billion to $53 billion per year in pesticides and damage to crops

In comparison, the coronavirus scare has wiped out $1.5 trillion from US equity valuations just in the past two days. Even taking the higher end of that estimate, preventing one coronavirus epidemic every 20 years still passes cost benefit analysis.

I do not consider vagaries of the stock market a valid reason to potentially wipe out an entire species.

More than that, you correctly identify it as a scare, which should be a clear indication how a short-sighted policy that may be.

Valuations != realized losses.

Not to mention eradication efforts are expensive and can have their own unintended consequences. Offer a bounty, and now you have people breeding bats for the bounties. Introduce a bat-specific disease and it may mutate into something else. A bat-specific poison could turn out to poison things we care about.

Like seriously, it's a stupid idea. I'm sad I wasted so much time even debating you.

> One thing we may have to consider is a policy of bat eradication.

Holy crap! This is a bad idea. Just leave the bats alone. They serve as an apex predator to provide balance to the natural environment.

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