Question: Do bats fight infections like humans or do their bodies do it differently.

Keith Grehan answered on 19 Jun 2014:

Great question, I did a whole Master’s degree for 2 years to investigate this 🙂
I’m sorry to say there is still loads we don’t know about how bat immunity works but at the moment it appears that their immune system behaves in the same way ours do. When we are exposed (infected) with a disease (virus, Bacteria, parasite etc.) our immune system first reacts with what is called innate immunity (by innate we mean literally “built-in” or automatic) this starts your body fighting the disease and causes what we call inflammation (the area with the infection gets hot and sometimes swollen). The innate immune system of bats behaves in the same way (there are differences but they are more similar than different) unless they are hibernating.
The next step is when our back-up system kicks in, this is called the Adaptive immune system. In this bit your body is making antibodies, which are small proteins that neutralise (kill or disable) the disease. The adaptive immune system takes more time to get started but once it has kicked in it will retain a memory of that infection by keeping some cells of your body ready to produce antibodies as soon as that disease is seen again (this is the system that vaccines have an effect on). Again we see this same system in bats doing basically the same thing.
However, it could be that the immune system of bats acts the same as ours but just is used to fighting different infections.
When Europeans first discovered America diseases that didn’t affect too seriously them hurt a lot of the native people in America. This was because to the natives these were brand new diseases and their bodies didn’t know how to handle them. It is very likely that the diseases that spread from bats to humans are just like that….for bats they are just normal and nothing to worry about but for us they are really bad. There is a good chance that we are seeing these diseases now because now people are living in areas where there were never people before so we are now having contact with bats (sometimes even if we don’t know it) and so we are getting exposed to new diseases. If this is true then it makes figuring out what diseases the bats have and how common they are even more important because as the human population gets even bigger there will be more and more exposure to new diseases
One last thing I want to add is that when bats are hibernating their immune system hibernates along with them…everything slows down in a big way we (scientists) are only now beginning to look at how this hibernation cycle affects diseases that the bats may be carrying. It’s a really interesting area and could give us new information in the future. In the USA a lot of bats have been killed by a disease called White Nose syndrome that is caused by a fungus that attacks bats while they hibernate if their immune systems were fully functional it would probably be able to fight off the disease but since the bats are getting infected when they are hibernating their metabolism is not reacting the way it needs to. Lots of research in this area has kicked off since the disease was discovered and this work is probably going to tell us a lot about the bats react to diseases of all sorts and how