Question: Do the diseases, found in bats, which are dangerous to people affect the bats in the same way?

Keith Grehan answered on 20 Jun 2014:

Brilliant question! Some diseases do, there are some diseases that affect bats and humans just the same however there are others that are really dangerous for people but bats seem to have little or no negative effects from them.
When we look at animals as potential sources of disease we are looking for what is called a reservoir host, this basically means that when it is not infecting people the disease is living in these animals. Most of these diseases do not affect the reservoir host the same way at all and this is critical way we figure out that a species is a reservoir for a particular disease. Mostly for these diseases the reason they don’t have the same effect on their reservoir is that the reservoir has evolved with the host over a long time period. The host and the disease have a sort of stalemate and both live with each other without doing too much damage. But when one of these diseases jump to another species then there is problems, the new host has not lived with the disease and so its immune system has a very limited ability to deal with this new disease. The disease meanwhile has evolved under circumstances where the host’s immune system controls it spread, suddenly the disease is free from that and so it spreads out of control. These are the diseases that I focus on they are often the worst for people as when they infect us they are completely new and can overwhelm the immune system causing serious harm or even death.