My opinion
 

By Dr. Deepak Gupta
Corresponding Author Dr. Deepak Gupta
Self, - United States of America
Submitting Author Dr. Deepak Gupta
INFECTIOUS DISEASES

Apophenia, Bats, SARS-CoV-0, SARS-CoV-X, COVID-19

Gupta D. Is It Apophenic Bet on Bats to Search for SARS-CoV-0 as Prequel and Prepare for SARS-CoV-X as Sequel to COVID-19 Pandemic?. WebmedCentral INFECTIOUS DISEASES 2021;12(5):WMC005725

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License(CC-BY), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
No
Submitted on: 22 May 2021 12:51:04 AM GMT
Published on: 28 May 2021 05:44:24 AM GMT

My opinion


My imagination has always run wild but it is running amok since COVID-19 pandemic. Currently, the question bugging me is “if pandemic had started with bat-consumption [1-2], will pandemic end with bat-consumption too?” as if lyrics penned by Qateel Shifai and sung by Jagjit Singh that translate as “He/She/It who/that has given this pain will also give medicine” [3-4] seem apt in my theoretical and non-conspiratorial search for SARS-CoV-0, the prequel to pandemic. Therefore, I am betting on bats not just as a blame for our global suffering during pandemic but as a theoretical understanding into our global differences in terms of complications and deaths during pandemic. This may help us innovate better for future pandemics originating from bats for which bats may play a role as a futuristic medicine just like it may have played a role in natural immunity among human populations who have been consuming bats or at least have been routinely exposed to bats since unknown times in the past [5-16]. These bat-consuming (or bat-exposed) human populations may have kept bat-consuming (or bat-exposed) geographical regions better equipped to deal with constant evolution of bat-viruses as parallel to bats becoming strongly immune to viruses [17-18] hosted by them when constant exposure to these bat-viruses inducing development of immunity over time not only among bats but also among bat-consuming (or bat-exposed) geographical regions’ humans too. It is unclear if SARS-CoV itself back in early 2000s may have been as detrimental as SARS-CoV-2 if globalization rates of transregional movements in 2010s have evolved way earlier in the 2000s itself [19-28]. Similarly, it is unclear if SARS-CoV-0 may have been prevalent and undetected as endemic in the bat-consuming (or bat-exposed) regions which may have been globally secluded, physically as well as informationally, before 2000s. The similar trend can be seen in the search for HIV that was christened in 1980s but has now been traced back to 1920s [29-30]. As the globalization trends are here to stay because of humanity evolving the need for exponential connectedness as an innate need for itself, this connectedness can be used to fight the cause by turning the cause into the medicine. Globally, human population may not start consuming bats as staple diet but medicines may have to be extracted from bats just like honey from bees by the Big Pharma only if and only after Big Pharma’s thorough scientific investigations in the future irrefutably prove it to be a non-apophenic bet on bats so that human population globally is having hormesis with wild life without consuming them as meat but in the form of extracted medicine. Experts may say that the bat-consuming (or bat-exposed) regions should abandon consumption of (or exposure to) bats [1]. That may be one option but viruses like HIV and SARS will find another intermediate animal host which some human populations somewhere in the world relish or are cozy with to become inadvertently immune as if naturally vaccinated to those evolving viruses and yet ending up transmitting those evolving viruses to the naïve world as Disease X, thus creating future pandemics.

 

The soul-searching questions by 21st-century humans must delve into foregone 20th-century humans’ history to prepare ourselves as 22nd-century humans.

  • Is there any other more plausible biological theory [31-36] for bat-consuming (or bat-exposed) geographical regions beating COVID-19 pandemic so effectively?
  • Is there any evidence for the conspiratorial theory about the under-reported SARS-CoV-2 cases and COVID-19 deaths from bat-consuming (or bat-exposed) geographical regions?
  • Isn’t it conspiratorial to believe that bat-consuming (or bat-exposed) geographical regions’ humans have innately become better disciplined over generations so as to enable stringent enforcement and maintenance of stricter lockdowns for containing and mitigating COVID-19 pandemic?
  • Isn’t it conspiratorial to envision real-life in bat-consuming (or bat-exposed) geographical regions as an extension of a plot from science fiction wherein bat-consuming (or bat-exposed) geographical regions have been envisioned to have had experimented with population therapies, hitherto unknown, on the lines of en masse covert variolation vaccination (as similar to historical methods of variolation [37-38]) among the unknowing humans inhabiting those bat-consuming (or bat-exposed) geographical regions?
  • Is it even feasible that sexualized revolution of late 20th-century evolving into virtual sexuality to contain HIV can make the case for globalized revolution of early 21st-century to evolve into virtual globalization to contain SARS and any future Disease X?
  • Has humanity ever completely abandoned its habits regarding food, mating and travel except when it is temporarily adapting them to the changing times which may sometimes imprint those changes as permanent ones thus evolving as the new normal from that point onwards?
  • Although small pox [39-40] did NOT evolve due to eating animals because small pox has had no animal vector since more than hundreds of thousands of years ago, did humanity being a vector itself stop traveling despite deaths due to small pox happening across the continents until recently?  
  • Can humans stop eating plants once they discover that plant-viruses too are jumping into humans [41-47]?

 

Essentially, I am envisioning with a straight face that, futuristically, globe-trottering humans may have to metaphorically evolve hormesis with over-the-counter “bat-soups” or prescription “bat-syrups” as their controlled exposure to develop bat-like immunity over generations against future  SARS-CoV-X irrespective of whether or not they inhabit bat-consuming (or bat-exposed) geographical regions, unless this is no longer my imagination running wild or amok but evolving into a delusional unimaginably non-conspiratorial hallucinations as similar to potentially dead-end scientific explorations into cow-urine distillates [48-49].

Reference(s)


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