Its a bird, Its a plane, Its a flying puppy!!

Since this is my very last blog post I decided to do it about my all time favorite animal. My favorite animal is the bat. I find them precious and really want one as a pet. I have done a couple projects within this semester on them in ecology and I find their behavior to be extremely interesting. For a fun fact, there is actually a cave in San Antonio called Bracken Cave that over 15 million pregnant bats migrate to, to give birth. There is almost 500 bats per square foot of the cave ceiling. That is not what I am going to talk about in this blog though. In this blog I am going to be talking about one of the diseases that bats can transmit to you.

You cannot actually get many diseases from bats like we grew up learning as children. The normal one you would expect a bat to give you is rabies. You can only obtain rabies if you are bit during its virulent stage. You can also get lung cancer from bats, but you can also get this from birds. I had a family friend that contracted lung cancer from her certain type of bird pooping in her house and her inhaling it for a long period of time. The disease I am going to focus on is Histoplasmosis, which is a type of lung cancer. It is found that the bat poop, otherwise known as guano, serves as a host for a fungus called Histoplasma Capsulatum. For the guano to contain this fungus it usually has to be a couple years old.      

The people that contract this are usually infants or people with weakened immune systems. The common occupations that these people have are construction workers, farmers, pest control workers, roofer, landscaper, or demolition worker. The unfortunate people that contract this disease sometimes don’t even know they did. The people that contract this are usually infants or people with weakened immune systems. The other not so lucky people just get the mild symptoms of the flu such as chills, fever, aching joints, and a cough. These symptoms have been known to go on for weeks or not go away at all. This is when you develop a chronic lung infection. To test if you have this disease they can perform a fungal culture where they will sample a small piece of tissue from the skin or liver. They can also do a blood test. To treat this disease an antifungul medication call Itraconazole is used for three to twelve months.

This absolutely does not change my mind about getting a bat as a pet. I don’t plan on leaving my bats poop in the cage for longer than a couple days, much less a couple years. Cheers to these super cuddly little flying puppies.

 

http://www.batsintheattic.org/diseases.html

https://www.healthline.com/health/histoplasmosis