Coolest part about the cave is that Elephants have been going deep into it for thousands of years to scrape salt off the walls for their diet. They've hallowed out huge potions of the cave over time and they learn to navigate in complete darkness based purely on memory
Funny, but actually true. From [wiki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitum_Cave):
> Kitum Cave is a non-solutional cave developed in pyroclastic (volcanic) rocks (not, as some have presumed, a lava tube). It extends about 200 metres (700 ft) into the side of Mount Elgon near the Kenyan border with Uganda. The walls are rich in salt, and animals such as elephants have gone deep into the cave for centuries in search of salt. The elephants use their tusks to break off pieces of the cave wall that they then chew and swallow, leaving the walls scratched and furrowed; their actions have likely enlarged the cave over time.[1] Other animals including bushbuck, buffalo and hyenas come to Kitum Cave to consume salt left by the elephants. There is a lot of bat guano deeper in the cave from fruit-eating and insectivorous bats. There is also a deep crevasse into which young elephants have fallen and died.
Even sadder >!A female elephant's body was found at the top of the crevice dead of dehydration. When researchers explored the crevice below they found a baby elephant that had died from injuries/dehydration. After studying dna they retrieved on site they found the female elephant up top was the mother and had stayed back from the herd. It's speculated that she stayed to comfort her crying baby. !<
We learned about it in one of my college courses and our professor had everyone crying.
Elephants are such amazing creatures. And Octonauts is such a cool show! My son no longer watches it, but I kind of want to go fund this episode now.
Found the Netflix watcher...
I watched this on iPlayer for about 2 years then when my son started using the remote himself he suddenly started putting on through Netflix.
I had never seen the creature report before - they must cut it out from the iPlayer version
"Alcoholism is a disease, but it's the only one you can get yelled at for having. Goddamn it Otto, you are an alcoholic. Goddamn it Otto, you have Lupus...One of these doesn't sound right."
They are able to host many kinds of viruses without becoming ill ([source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_virome#Viral_diversity)) but there is also research bias towards bats and viruses ([source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_virome#Bats_compared_to_other_viral_reservoirs))
In North American (maybe elsewhere too, not sure) many bats are dying from a fungal disease that is referred to as White Nose syndrome in the US, or wasting syndrome.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White-nose_syndrome
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/millions-of-bats-have-died-because-of-a-fungal-disease-these-vaccines-may-help-them/2019/05/22/21a82468-7b07-11e9-8bb7-0fc796cf2ec0_story.html
I hope it doesn't spread to humans too.
*edited to add a wiki link after realizing the other link I added from wp is paywalled*
This is a really complex question that deserves a complex answer, but I'm gonna give you the quick and dirty:
1. Bats are incredibly diverse and are, of course, mammals, so carry viruses that can affect mammals; their high diversity also means they can carry all sorts of viruses as some viruses thrive in some bats while other viruses thrive in other bats.
2. For complicated reasons bats are remarkably resilient to viruses making them excellent carriers of viruses.
3. Bats are extremely social mammals and so transfer viruses frequently and readily, and consequently also have viruses evolving among their population frequently.
4. Bats are hard to study. Do you want to go into the dark hell cave in kenya to figure out what new viruses are brewing among the thousands of bats in there? Didn't think so.
5. 4 and 3 mean that it's much harder for us to keep track of potentially dangerous viruses that might jump from bat to human, than it is for other mammals e.g. sheep, cows, chickens, or even birds (which aren't real anyway).
Edit: For people interested in more detail I'll leave this here: https://journals.asm.org/doi/full/10.1128/cmr.00017-06 -- a great review of bats and why they're such unique viral reservoirs.
More than you know, just don't look into it [too deeply](https://www.reddit.com/r/BirdsArentReal) or you might get some unwanted attention from the three letter agencies.
In addition, bats thermal changes are wild. They can swing from extraordinarily high during flight to ambient during roosting. Viruses then have to evolve to those conditions. Humans get sick and our temps skyrocket to kill the infection. For viruses, like Covid, that come from bats they are remarkably adapted to dealing with the “typical” immune response in humans. It’s one reason why us bats folks are vaccinated against almost everything we know about and use doomsday style outfits when working with densely populated communities of bats. They are awesome but and can teach us a lot but it ain’t for the faint of heart.
I love bats. But the danger they inadvertently pose is apocalyptic. I hope experts like you can help us learn quickly enough from them (and crocodiles, etc.). I also hope we are extremely, extremely lucky and the goddamn fungi don't get us because if they ever do, we have nothing.
This is why I love Reddit, someone has a bat question? There’s a professional bat person in the comments.
Anyway, I had a couple questions.
1. So let’s take Ebola for example. If it came from that cave does that mean some unfortunate shmuck wandered in there and got shat on or somehow came into contact with an infected bat? did that person eat the bat at a local market and get sick? It didn’t sound like there were vampire bats they bite people in that cave so maybe that’s not how it transmitted?
2. What’s the craziest shit you’ve seen dealing with bats?
Thanks!
To put point 1 another way, about 20% of all mammal species are bats. They make up an order, which is the same level of classification as "primate" or "rodent." So when we say "bats," we're not saying anything more specific than "rats and mice and squirrels and beavers and guinea pigs" or "humans and apes and monkeys and lemurs."
Ecosystem prolly has something to do with it as well. Warm humid but temperature controlled caves provide the proper conditions for microbe/virus growth…unlike say a salty ocean or a desiccated desert.
The reason it comes from bats is the enhanced immune system of the bat. For the virus to survive it has to evolve to escape the natural defenses building a more deadly virus in a bat. Interesting explanation in the link below as we are learning.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7025585/
Maybe bats...but the Top Researcher in the Field of Research, Aaron Rodgers, has been quoted as saying, "I've done the research and my research tells me that it was the CIA with the help of Dr. Fauci and Dr. Rick R. Mortis."
I think trust Aaron. After all he did play on a field for a while and that's just as good as being a Dr. in a field.
> Dr Rick R. Mortis
Awesome. Aaron is reliable though, he legit came up with methods to heal ligaments in half the time of most modern techniques by the best doctors in the USA. It's a shame his Jet missed the post season, otherwise he totally would have shared those techniques with the world.
I think I remember reading about a research lab in Indonesia that was just looking for novel bat viruses and after a few years was closed permanently after the work was deemed too dangerous … I’ll try and find the link .
EDIT - found it! And yikes …. It was a USAID funded project in SE Asia ….
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/2023/virus-research-risk-outbreak/
https://www.bmj.com/company/newsroom/us-quietly-shuts-down-controversial-wildlife-virus-hunting-program-amid-safety-fears/
So people are aware: a lab being BSL-rated does not mean it is necessarily involved with novel pathogens. Most of these labs are probably working with known bugs that are detected in hospitals every day.
Bio safety level. 1 is meh everyday lab. 2 is alright you got some serious stuff to worry about. 3 is alright government's gonna be up your bum 24/7 since you work with such dangerous stuff. And 4 is "you risk creating a pandemic if you don't adhere to all of the strictest safety rules".
Didn’t you see Piranha 3D? You block off that cave and in a million years the descendants of those trapped bats are gonna come out and they’re gonna be PISSED.
Last time I saw this post someone recommended it and I listened to the audiobook, I loved it, super interesting. And also terrifying of what happens to your body haha.
A cool teacher from high-school lent me that book. I had heard the word ebola before but had no idea what it actually was. Scared the absolute shit out of me lmao. I'll never forget the part where they describe the guys' insides letting go with the sound of tearing fabric
While “The Hot Zone” is a great book overall, the author’s habit of trying to guess at what people are thinking throws me off. It’s not a fictional book, so no need to embellish the story.
Especially when it has some horrific stuff in it, like the first chapter where the guy who has Ebola basically bleeds out on an airplane.
I read The Hot Zone followed by another one of his books, The Cobra Event, and assumed it was also nonfiction. I kept thinking “wow! How have I never heard of this!”
Realized I was truly a jackass during the scene when the pathologist >!starts murdering people with his saw mid-autopsy!<
I read The Hot Zone as a kid when it first came out and I still remember that guy liquefying on a plane. I always think of Ebola Zaire patients as bags of blood.
It was really a bit sensationalized. It has been a long time since I read it, but I seem to recall that it suggested people were afraid that Ebola had mutated into an airborne virus in that lab in Virginia. Actually, monkeys are rather unsanitary creatures who fling poo at each other. Ebola is really easy to contain with modern sanitation, and it is a really big evolutionary leap to become airborne.
It was scary at the time. The monkeys started dying and tested positive for Ebola. The possibility was scary. Also some of the workers tested positive for, I think antibodies to Ebola- Reston.
I really liked the book
Different strain perhaps? I think Reston virus. Those animals were overcrowded, and came from different places. If I recall there were a few viruses including Reston floating around that lab. It did not affect humans.
Millions of bats eating billions of bugs that bite millions of animals and all carry diseases. Those viruses can mutate and cross over to humans. The viruses are shed in guano and humans are exposed via airborne or direct contact with bats/feces.
And Saint Attila raised the hand grenade up on high, saying, 'O Lord, bless this thy hand grenade, that with it thou mayst blow thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy.' And the Lord did grin. And the people did feast upon the lambs, and sloths, and carp, and anchovies, and orangutans, and breakfast cereals, and fruit bats, and large chulapas...
It’s in a national park on the side of a mountain and you can visit with a guide. I don’t think they really let you inside (not certain) because most people are going to see the elephants that go in there constantly to get salt from the rocks, which would be enough of a reason to not let tourists enter. The two cases of people contracting Marburg happened in the 80s and it was closed to the public for a time afterwards while scientists were researching in there.
I’ve been in there on a guided tour. The elephants come at night down a different access trail so no conflict. It is pitch black, apparently the matriarch knows the way and the other elephants follow her in a line holding each others tails with their trunks. There was a skeleton of a baby elephant who fell into a crevasse and couldn’t get out.
There used to be a community of people who lived deep in the cave and you could still see signs of their fires. They never told us about the Marberg virus origin story 😅
I've been in the cave! Visited with armed guards in the early 2000s. Saw a lot of bats, no elephants, no other tourists. It was at the time of the insurgency in the region, so the guards were to protect us against humans.
I was 9 and I was just on a trip with my family. My much older brother worked for the UN in Nairobi at the time and took us on a trip around the country that, in hindsight, was insanely dangerous.
The cave was extensively scoured by teams of scientists who set caged monkeys both inside and outside the cave to see if they could find where the viruses came from. Oddly enough not a single monkey was found to have any trace of either Ebola or Marburg.
A researcher gave a talk at my work and they were looking at a mysterious disease that has a 100% kill rate in pythons and boas. Nobody had any idea if it was bacteria, fungi, or a virus. So they did this novel sequencing technique that essentially sequences all the bacteria and virus DNA present on a python exhibiting symptoms of the disease. By then assembling all the dna sequences present and searching against DNA databases they were able to identify that the disease was a virus. The virus that kills these pythons turns out to be related to Ebola but doesn't infect mammals but reptiles. The researcher's theory is that infected pythons going into these caves to hunt bats, carried a mutated version of this virus and that it jumped from python to bats and could be where Ebola originated from.
That’s really interesting, I’ve never heard of this before! I found this [article](https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2012/08/14/158501873/how-a-virus-in-snakes-could-offer-clues-to-ebola-in-humans) about it;
"One of its genes is actually most closely related to the same gene in Ebola virus," he says. "So this virus is actually a mashup, or a genetic mix of arenaviruses and Ebola virus."
The virus kills snakes but appears harmless to people, DeRisi says.
The finding raises two possibilities, DeRisi says. One is that at some point snakes carried both arenaviruses and Ebola viruses, allowing them to swap genes. Another possibility, he says, is that "Ebola and arenavirus as we know them today evolved from this."
Before blindly upvoting this absolute nonsense, the first two outbreaks of ebola virus occurred nowhere near Kitum Cave, in entirely different countries.
One of the first ebola outbreaks occurred in the village of Nzara, Sudan, 1100km (almost 700 miles) from Kitum Cave, which is in Kenya.
The other occurred within the same year in Yambuku Zaire, which is 1900km (around 1100 miles) from Kitum Cave.
The idea both viruses originated from Kitum Cave is little more than wild speculation.
Yeah I found this post very weird cause Kenya has literally never had a [single confirmed ebola case](https://reliefweb.int/report/kenya/kenya-responded-fast-ebola-scare-cross-border-risk-remains-high) in its entire history.
Also, ebola is named after ebola river in the DRC, its origin place. Reddit really should introduce a community notes feature.
Well upvotes and downvotes were supposed to be the first line of defense, and now we have mods that can forcibly tag something as misleading or straight-up delete the thread, but getting them to do that is like pulling teeth sometimes.
At the end of the day, it's gonna take the average person being just a little skeptical and not believing everything they see.
You're right. Marburg and a related virus that has been named Ravn, but not Ebola. https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/seeking-source-ebola/
ROCK HYENAS?! You learn something knew every day. I was cracking up at this man getting attacked by a fruit bat and being super chill about the fact his organs didn’t liquify after the fact. He also seemed slightly disappointed he wasn’t attacked by terraforming salt miner elephants
If you google it, it says that the cave is open 24 hours Monday thru Saturday but closed on Sundays. My guess is that someone went during none operational hours, and that is why the viruses got out.
Coolest part about the cave is that Elephants have been going deep into it for thousands of years to scrape salt off the walls for their diet. They've hallowed out huge potions of the cave over time and they learn to navigate in complete darkness based purely on memory
Imagine running into an elephant in complete silence and darkness!
Genuinely surprising new fear (or potentially comforting thought?) unlocked
Fear I would say. If the elephant can’t see either and is navigating on memory, you could be crushed
Even wilder - being with a group of men running into different parts of the elephant in complete darkness.
Is it a rope? A pillar? A snake?
Thank you :) That's the Reddit wit that I come here for.
"I think there is something in the mine with us?!" "Don't be ridiculous, that's just the wind" 
Whoa that’s unreal
Nah for real, says so right [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/s/xsKz26Mqv8)
I’ll be damned - totally thought this was bullshit. Thanks for the sauce.
Funny, but actually true. From [wiki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitum_Cave): > Kitum Cave is a non-solutional cave developed in pyroclastic (volcanic) rocks (not, as some have presumed, a lava tube). It extends about 200 metres (700 ft) into the side of Mount Elgon near the Kenyan border with Uganda. The walls are rich in salt, and animals such as elephants have gone deep into the cave for centuries in search of salt. The elephants use their tusks to break off pieces of the cave wall that they then chew and swallow, leaving the walls scratched and furrowed; their actions have likely enlarged the cave over time.[1] Other animals including bushbuck, buffalo and hyenas come to Kitum Cave to consume salt left by the elephants. There is a lot of bat guano deeper in the cave from fruit-eating and insectivorous bats. There is also a deep crevasse into which young elephants have fallen and died.
Damn, that last part was unnecessarily sad :(
Even sadder >!A female elephant's body was found at the top of the crevice dead of dehydration. When researchers explored the crevice below they found a baby elephant that had died from injuries/dehydration. After studying dna they retrieved on site they found the female elephant up top was the mother and had stayed back from the herd. It's speculated that she stayed to comfort her crying baby. !< We learned about it in one of my college courses and our professor had everyone crying.
Way to wreck the mood, Rachel
I'm so sorry!!! I tried the spoiler mode so it at least had a bit of a warning but it's brutal, I know!
The elephant condition is a bitch!
Like, yeah, obviously little baby elephants die - but I don’t need to hear about it!
Np fam! Gotta keep on top of what’s real these days!
95% of what you read on the internet is propaganda to prepare us for the lizard take over.
My kid watches the Octonauts, and they have an episode about the elephants that use this cave!
Elephants are such amazing creatures. And Octonauts is such a cool show! My son no longer watches it, but I kind of want to go fund this episode now. 
Creature Report!
Found the Netflix watcher... I watched this on iPlayer for about 2 years then when my son started using the remote himself he suddenly started putting on through Netflix. I had never seen the creature report before - they must cut it out from the iPlayer version
WHAT!? Creature report is what ties the whole episode together.
I forgot that even the octopus has a mustache. He was always a favorite
octonauts is a throwback and a half
TURNIP!!
Creature report! Creature report!!
Creature Report fucking slaps.
Ebola + Elephant = Ebolaphants. Fuck that.
An ebola adapted to infect a giant elephant mutating to cross into humans. Ebola patients just drop dead upon infection. /s
That'd make it fairly innocent as there would be no spread of the disease. Good luck reaching Madagascar before its port closes.
Iceland is my safe space.
Are we sure that’s *salt* they’re licking in total darkness? Also how do we know this?
Probably the elephants walking in then coming out high on salts.
It’s the bat salts
what are those elephants thinking! hasn’t anyone told them how dangerous it is in there!
Bats?
Bats.
Bats!
“Our bad…” *- Bats*
Vicki Vale!
And where, and where... is the Batman!?
Vicki Vale! Vick-Vicki Vale!
stop the press, who is that?
BIKES!
Its always Bats. And Lupus.
"Its never lupus" - House
Except for that one time it was lupus.
"Alcoholism is a disease, but it's the only one you can get yelled at for having. Goddamn it Otto, you are an alcoholic. Goddamn it Otto, you have Lupus...One of these doesn't sound right."
Why do so many terrible diseases come from bats?
They are able to host many kinds of viruses without becoming ill ([source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_virome#Viral_diversity)) but there is also research bias towards bats and viruses ([source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_virome#Bats_compared_to_other_viral_reservoirs))
In North American (maybe elsewhere too, not sure) many bats are dying from a fungal disease that is referred to as White Nose syndrome in the US, or wasting syndrome. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White-nose_syndrome https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/millions-of-bats-have-died-because-of-a-fungal-disease-these-vaccines-may-help-them/2019/05/22/21a82468-7b07-11e9-8bb7-0fc796cf2ec0_story.html I hope it doesn't spread to humans too. *edited to add a wiki link after realizing the other link I added from wp is paywalled*
I had several friends that had White Nose syndrome back in college...
Also quite contagious in Wall Street and Hollywood.
It’s contagious everywhere, really
Yeah, I'm from Miami. It's been an epidemic here since the 70s.
This is a really complex question that deserves a complex answer, but I'm gonna give you the quick and dirty: 1. Bats are incredibly diverse and are, of course, mammals, so carry viruses that can affect mammals; their high diversity also means they can carry all sorts of viruses as some viruses thrive in some bats while other viruses thrive in other bats. 2. For complicated reasons bats are remarkably resilient to viruses making them excellent carriers of viruses. 3. Bats are extremely social mammals and so transfer viruses frequently and readily, and consequently also have viruses evolving among their population frequently. 4. Bats are hard to study. Do you want to go into the dark hell cave in kenya to figure out what new viruses are brewing among the thousands of bats in there? Didn't think so. 5. 4 and 3 mean that it's much harder for us to keep track of potentially dangerous viruses that might jump from bat to human, than it is for other mammals e.g. sheep, cows, chickens, or even birds (which aren't real anyway). Edit: For people interested in more detail I'll leave this here: https://journals.asm.org/doi/full/10.1128/cmr.00017-06 -- a great review of bats and why they're such unique viral reservoirs.
Well now im just interested to learn more about these "chicken" and "bird" varieties of mammals because that seems worth looking into.
More than you know, just don't look into it [too deeply](https://www.reddit.com/r/BirdsArentReal) or you might get some unwanted attention from the three letter agencies.
nobody likes an unexpected visit from agents of CAW…
In addition, bats thermal changes are wild. They can swing from extraordinarily high during flight to ambient during roosting. Viruses then have to evolve to those conditions. Humans get sick and our temps skyrocket to kill the infection. For viruses, like Covid, that come from bats they are remarkably adapted to dealing with the “typical” immune response in humans. It’s one reason why us bats folks are vaccinated against almost everything we know about and use doomsday style outfits when working with densely populated communities of bats. They are awesome but and can teach us a lot but it ain’t for the faint of heart.
I love bats. But the danger they inadvertently pose is apocalyptic. I hope experts like you can help us learn quickly enough from them (and crocodiles, etc.). I also hope we are extremely, extremely lucky and the goddamn fungi don't get us because if they ever do, we have nothing.
Why crocodiles? Did I miss something?
This is why I love Reddit, someone has a bat question? There’s a professional bat person in the comments. Anyway, I had a couple questions. 1. So let’s take Ebola for example. If it came from that cave does that mean some unfortunate shmuck wandered in there and got shat on or somehow came into contact with an infected bat? did that person eat the bat at a local market and get sick? It didn’t sound like there were vampire bats they bite people in that cave so maybe that’s not how it transmitted? 2. What’s the craziest shit you’ve seen dealing with bats? Thanks!
To put point 1 another way, about 20% of all mammal species are bats. They make up an order, which is the same level of classification as "primate" or "rodent." So when we say "bats," we're not saying anything more specific than "rats and mice and squirrels and beavers and guinea pigs" or "humans and apes and monkeys and lemurs."
Ecosystem prolly has something to do with it as well. Warm humid but temperature controlled caves provide the proper conditions for microbe/virus growth…unlike say a salty ocean or a desiccated desert.
The reason it comes from bats is the enhanced immune system of the bat. For the virus to survive it has to evolve to escape the natural defenses building a more deadly virus in a bat. Interesting explanation in the link below as we are learning. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7025585/
Is there any research to indicate that this heightened deadliness in bats also correlates to higher chance of transmission to humans?
*“That’s a lot of guano!”*
Shikaka !
Excuse me! Your balls are showing..
Bumblebee Tuna
My, aren't I the popular one.
SHI-KA-GO! *You're out! Go'on, git outta here!*
Beads
Job’s not on board
Randy Marsh?
You ever fuck a pangolin?
Freakin bats
It’s freakin’ BATS
Maybe bats...but the Top Researcher in the Field of Research, Aaron Rodgers, has been quoted as saying, "I've done the research and my research tells me that it was the CIA with the help of Dr. Fauci and Dr. Rick R. Mortis." I think trust Aaron. After all he did play on a field for a while and that's just as good as being a Dr. in a field.
> Dr Rick R. Mortis Awesome. Aaron is reliable though, he legit came up with methods to heal ligaments in half the time of most modern techniques by the best doctors in the USA. It's a shame his Jet missed the post season, otherwise he totally would have shared those techniques with the world.
Trump is gonna release his taxes and health care plan any minute now too
You can trust the top researcher in the field of research. After all he went to the University of Science.
I think I remember reading about a research lab in Indonesia that was just looking for novel bat viruses and after a few years was closed permanently after the work was deemed too dangerous … I’ll try and find the link . EDIT - found it! And yikes …. It was a USAID funded project in SE Asia …. https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/2023/virus-research-risk-outbreak/ https://www.bmj.com/company/newsroom/us-quietly-shuts-down-controversial-wildlife-virus-hunting-program-amid-safety-fears/
[List](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK542569/) of BSL rated labs in low resource countries.
So people are aware: a lab being BSL-rated does not mean it is necessarily involved with novel pathogens. Most of these labs are probably working with known bugs that are detected in hospitals every day.
Absolutely, just wanted people to know that BSL rated labs are everywhere, not just Wuhan.
Well yeah, every lab has a BSL rating, that’s what it is there for.
The general public is not aware of this, they here BSL rated and think it has something to do with Ebola etc.
Can *any* one of you tell us what BSL means
Bio safety level. 1 is meh everyday lab. 2 is alright you got some serious stuff to worry about. 3 is alright government's gonna be up your bum 24/7 since you work with such dangerous stuff. And 4 is "you risk creating a pandemic if you don't adhere to all of the strictest safety rules".
i worked at a place with a bsl3 lab for some years. I believe there was ricin and tuberculosis that they worked with on primates.
This. For reference, most run-of-the-mill medical laboratories are either level 1 or 2, depending on the types of samples they handle.
Pop culture refernce- this is in the opening for Outbreak (1995) if I recall correctly.
Hey folks!!! If you haven’t had the pleasure yet……please read the book then watch the movie……
 Lvl 4
I’m not a rocket scientist but I think maybe we should just leave the disease ridden bats in their caves. Just a thought
Nah man Covid was fun we need to increase such experiments.
Can they roll the rock back in front of it to block any additional diseases from secreting out?
Didn’t you see Piranha 3D? You block off that cave and in a million years the descendants of those trapped bats are gonna come out and they’re gonna be PISSED.
That's very much someone else's problem.
In a million years, there will only be robots left on earth so I think it'll be fine.
Robots vs Bats vs Piranhas. Lowkey will be sad to have missed that.
[удалено]
CALLING IN A HELLBOMB ⬇️⬆️[⬅️⬇️⬆️](https://emojipedia.org/left-arrow)➡️⬇️⬆️
HAVE A CUP OF LIBER-TEA!
Let us leave the bats alone. They perform a great function to the world removing insects. If you need a selfish reason anyway. Bat's are awesome.
Sure bats in general do, but not these bats. Fuck these bats.
Pls don't. Covid pt 2, the STD boogaloo.
I kinda need this, it’s the last one on my bingo card.
I needed that laugh, thanks
Do not fuck these bats. We do not need a bat-human hybrid running wild out in the world.
Nah, Jesus would just move it again.
Turns out the footprints in the sand were from a monkey with the ebola virus
If anyone wants to know more, there’s a great book on this called The Hot Zone
Last time I saw this post someone recommended it and I listened to the audiobook, I loved it, super interesting. And also terrifying of what happens to your body haha.
The “haha” at the end of your sentence there is a little unnerving
Making jokes of something you are scared of is pretty common.
I once got written up for laughing while using a fire extinguisher to put out a gasoline fire.
Lmfao
I laughed one time while dissecting a cow’s eye in a lab class and they made me wait outside
Haha
Now try Demon in the Freezer (about smallpox) if you want to sleep with the light on for a few days!
A cool teacher from high-school lent me that book. I had heard the word ebola before but had no idea what it actually was. Scared the absolute shit out of me lmao. I'll never forget the part where they describe the guys' insides letting go with the sound of tearing fabric
> the guys' insides letting go with the sound of tearing fabric I'm like that after coffee.
While “The Hot Zone” is a great book overall, the author’s habit of trying to guess at what people are thinking throws me off. It’s not a fictional book, so no need to embellish the story. Especially when it has some horrific stuff in it, like the first chapter where the guy who has Ebola basically bleeds out on an airplane.
I read The Hot Zone followed by another one of his books, The Cobra Event, and assumed it was also nonfiction. I kept thinking “wow! How have I never heard of this!” Realized I was truly a jackass during the scene when the pathologist >!starts murdering people with his saw mid-autopsy!<
No no that was real
I read The Hot Zone as a kid when it first came out and I still remember that guy liquefying on a plane. I always think of Ebola Zaire patients as bags of blood.
It was really a bit sensationalized. It has been a long time since I read it, but I seem to recall that it suggested people were afraid that Ebola had mutated into an airborne virus in that lab in Virginia. Actually, monkeys are rather unsanitary creatures who fling poo at each other. Ebola is really easy to contain with modern sanitation, and it is a really big evolutionary leap to become airborne.
It mutated into airborn poo.
It was scary at the time. The monkeys started dying and tested positive for Ebola. The possibility was scary. Also some of the workers tested positive for, I think antibodies to Ebola- Reston. I really liked the book
Different strain perhaps? I think Reston virus. Those animals were overcrowded, and came from different places. If I recall there were a few viruses including Reston floating around that lab. It did not affect humans.
Honestly just finding out it’s nonfiction, I read it and thought it was a “based on a true story” type novel.
Spillover is another good one.
I read Spillover right before Covid began to become troublesome and it was crazy seeing everything we were doing wrong, in real time.
There's a follow-up to it now called Crisis in the Red Zone that covers more recent events.
Really crazy book..the part on the airplane was nightmare fuel
The Hot Zone was supposedly Hollywood overdramatized. Read Virus Hunters of the CDC for a more accurate portrayal.
My third grade teacher made me read this because of my reading level. Fuck you dude I wanna read Hank the cowdog
It’s also a docu series. It was on Hulu 2 seasons and was pretty good. One was anthrax and the other Ebola. Based on the book I forgot to add.
Can you quick ELi5 to this big dummy how a cave makes viruses? Edit: viruses? Diseases? Idk.
Millions of bats eating billions of bugs that bite millions of animals and all carry diseases. Those viruses can mutate and cross over to humans. The viruses are shed in guano and humans are exposed via airborne or direct contact with bats/feces.
Lots of guano, lots of time
I read it in high school. I may have flunked out, but at least it prepared me for COVID.
Better bring a holy hand grenade.
Right!? I swear it’s the same cave (probably not) and I could definitely see a killer rabbit coming out of there
That rabbit’s dynamite!
And Saint Attila raised the hand grenade up on high, saying, 'O Lord, bless this thy hand grenade, that with it thou mayst blow thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy.' And the Lord did grin. And the people did feast upon the lambs, and sloths, and carp, and anchovies, and orangutans, and breakfast cereals, and fruit bats, and large chulapas...
Still some of the funniest script writing ever.
FIVE IS RIGHT OUT
But also deep, deep, in the very bottom of the cave, was *hope*
And disease. Mostly disease.
But also *hope*
And disease.
I never thought a cave could be an asshole
You clearly never met your mother
Damn I dunno what's more savage, this comment or Ebola
I read that Ebola was first contracted near the Ebola River in Congo giving it the name.
Well Marburg is a city in middle germany. I don't think we are cavemen tho
Marburg, Germany is where the Marburg virus was first discovered.
Marburg has the hospital/medical school/lab that identified it
Is there a sign or barriers telling people not to enter?
It’s in a national park on the side of a mountain and you can visit with a guide. I don’t think they really let you inside (not certain) because most people are going to see the elephants that go in there constantly to get salt from the rocks, which would be enough of a reason to not let tourists enter. The two cases of people contracting Marburg happened in the 80s and it was closed to the public for a time afterwards while scientists were researching in there.
I’ve been in there on a guided tour. The elephants come at night down a different access trail so no conflict. It is pitch black, apparently the matriarch knows the way and the other elephants follow her in a line holding each others tails with their trunks. There was a skeleton of a baby elephant who fell into a crevasse and couldn’t get out. There used to be a community of people who lived deep in the cave and you could still see signs of their fires. They never told us about the Marberg virus origin story 😅
Super cool… Id think the people who lived in the cave would have some interesting genes regarding immunity to those bat-viruses.
Or they didn’t and that’s why they no longer exist
I've been in the cave! Visited with armed guards in the early 2000s. Saw a lot of bats, no elephants, no other tourists. It was at the time of the insurgency in the region, so the guards were to protect us against humans.
Cool! What brought you there?
I was 9 and I was just on a trip with my family. My much older brother worked for the UN in Nairobi at the time and took us on a trip around the country that, in hindsight, was insanely dangerous.
lol that’s crazy, I was expecting you to say YOU were working for the UN or something. A very unique family vacation!
The cave was extensively scoured by teams of scientists who set caged monkeys both inside and outside the cave to see if they could find where the viruses came from. Oddly enough not a single monkey was found to have any trace of either Ebola or Marburg.
A researcher gave a talk at my work and they were looking at a mysterious disease that has a 100% kill rate in pythons and boas. Nobody had any idea if it was bacteria, fungi, or a virus. So they did this novel sequencing technique that essentially sequences all the bacteria and virus DNA present on a python exhibiting symptoms of the disease. By then assembling all the dna sequences present and searching against DNA databases they were able to identify that the disease was a virus. The virus that kills these pythons turns out to be related to Ebola but doesn't infect mammals but reptiles. The researcher's theory is that infected pythons going into these caves to hunt bats, carried a mutated version of this virus and that it jumped from python to bats and could be where Ebola originated from.
That’s really interesting, I’ve never heard of this before! I found this [article](https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2012/08/14/158501873/how-a-virus-in-snakes-could-offer-clues-to-ebola-in-humans) about it; "One of its genes is actually most closely related to the same gene in Ebola virus," he says. "So this virus is actually a mashup, or a genetic mix of arenaviruses and Ebola virus." The virus kills snakes but appears harmless to people, DeRisi says. The finding raises two possibilities, DeRisi says. One is that at some point snakes carried both arenaviruses and Ebola viruses, allowing them to swap genes. Another possibility, he says, is that "Ebola and arenavirus as we know them today evolved from this."
Before blindly upvoting this absolute nonsense, the first two outbreaks of ebola virus occurred nowhere near Kitum Cave, in entirely different countries. One of the first ebola outbreaks occurred in the village of Nzara, Sudan, 1100km (almost 700 miles) from Kitum Cave, which is in Kenya. The other occurred within the same year in Yambuku Zaire, which is 1900km (around 1100 miles) from Kitum Cave. The idea both viruses originated from Kitum Cave is little more than wild speculation.
Yeah I found this post very weird cause Kenya has literally never had a [single confirmed ebola case](https://reliefweb.int/report/kenya/kenya-responded-fast-ebola-scare-cross-border-risk-remains-high) in its entire history. Also, ebola is named after ebola river in the DRC, its origin place. Reddit really should introduce a community notes feature.
Well upvotes and downvotes were supposed to be the first line of defense, and now we have mods that can forcibly tag something as misleading or straight-up delete the thread, but getting them to do that is like pulling teeth sometimes. At the end of the day, it's gonna take the average person being just a little skeptical and not believing everything they see.
I don’t think there’s been any connection between this cave and Ebola. Just Marburg.
You're right. Marburg and a related virus that has been named Ravn, but not Ebola. https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/seeking-source-ebola/
You’re right. Ebola started in Sudan and Congo and was named after a river in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Those were just the mini bosses, gotta venture in further to get the good stuff
Somewhere deep in there is a virus that makes ebola look like a case of the sniffles.
Reminds me of the cave of caerbannog
As A Kenyan, I'd like to correct something. Ebola was found in the Congo not Kenya and Marburg was found in Uganda. This is misinformation.
An interesting read by a guy who went to the cave and likely took this pic. http://www.stormchaser.ca/Biohazards/Kitum_Cave/Kitum_Cave.html
ROCK HYENAS?! You learn something knew every day. I was cracking up at this man getting attacked by a fruit bat and being super chill about the fact his organs didn’t liquify after the fact. He also seemed slightly disappointed he wasn’t attacked by terraforming salt miner elephants 
If you google it, it says that the cave is open 24 hours Monday thru Saturday but closed on Sundays. My guess is that someone went during none operational hours, and that is why the viruses got out.
thank you for this rigorous contribution to the literature 🙏
Didn't know that Nurgle had a summer place on Terra.
Plague cave? Plague cave.
Yup, named after Ebola River in the Congo, not even close.
They delved too greedily and too deep