There might finally be a scientific breakthrough in the case of the Great Bat Die-off, a plague caused by a bizzare cold-loving fungus that has slaughtered a million bats over the past four hibernation seasons.
It's not quite the polio vaccine, however. Instead, it's basically what you'd use to cure athlete's foot.
Researcher Vishnu Chaturvedi, who works in a lab at the New York State Department of Health, announced on Sunday at a meeting in Boston that several different commercial anti-fungal creams seem to fight the White-Nose Syndrome fungus. From the Associated Press:
They tested six strains of the novel fungus against drugs already used to treat people and animals such as cats and dogs for ailments ranging from athlete's foot to life-threatening infections. "We found that two major classes of antifungal drugs have very good activity" against the bat germ, Chaturvedi reported Sunday in Boston at a meeting of the American Society for Microbiology.
This may sound great, but, as the article points out, it might not be a great idea to slather a bunch of caves with anti-fungal medications willy-nilly:
Trying to handle surviving bats for treatment may stress them more than the disease does. And bats' habitats have other important plant and animal life that could be harmed by spraying antiseptics, Coleman said. "You don't want to go in and bomb a cave with an antifungal because you could be impacting other species," he said.
Above: Photo of a little brown bat sporting symptoms of White-Nose Syndrome in Vermont last year. Photo by Marvin Moriarty of the U.S. Fish an Wildlife Service, via Flickr.
