Bats are natural reservoir hosts for viruses that cause higher case fatality rates in humans than do zoonoses derived from any other source; this study offers a mechanistic explanation for this phenomenon

Bats are natural reservoir hosts for viruses that cause higher case fatality rates in humans than do zoonoses derived from any other source; this study builds a nested within-host, population-level model to offer a mechanistic explanation for this phenomenon.

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In your coverage, please use this URL to provide access to the freely available paper in PLOS Biology:   http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3002268

Article Title: Reservoir host immunology and life history shape virulence evolution in zoonotic viruses

Author Countries: Canada, US

Funding: This work was funded by two National Institutes of Health grants (1R01AI129822-01 and 5DP2AI171120-02) to CEB, an Adolph C. and Mary Sprague Miller Institute for Basic Research fellowship to CEB, a Branco Weiss Society in Science fellowship to CEB, an American Association for the Advancement of Science/L'Oréal-USA for Women in Science Fellowship to CEB, and a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency PREEMPT Program subgrant (D18AC00031) to CEB. This work was further supported by two National Science Foundation-Division of Environmental Biology grants to MB (#2011109 and #2109860). Additionally, CR was supported by the One Health Modelling Network for Emerging Infections (OMNI-RÉUNIS) with the support of Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the Public Health Agency of Canada. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.