MSU epidemiologist featured in Rolling Stone article
by Reagan Colyer, MSU News Service
BOZEMAN — Montana State University associate professor and epidemiologist Raina Plowright was recently featured in a Rolling Stone article examining how pandemics like COVID-19 come about.
The article, “How Climate Change is Ushering in a New Pandemic Era,” was published Dec. 7 and features Plowright alongside Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and one of the nation’s leading experts on COVID-19. The piece examines how viruses such as the coronavirus move from animal populations into humans and the role a changing climate may play in the frequency and severity of potential future pandemics.
Many animal species, writes the story’s author Jeff Goodell, are experiencing habitat changes due to climate change. As a result, some animal populations migrate closer to humans than previously recorded, bringing with them unique pathogens. Animals may have evolved to coexist with those unfamiliar pathogens, but when they infect humans, the results can vary widely.
Plowright, an associate professor in the College of Agriculture’s Department of Microbiology and Immunology, is a trained veterinarian who has also studied ecology. At MSU, she studies the viruses carried by bats, which are thought to be one of the sources of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.
“Climate change is affecting bats in profound ways,” said Plowright in the article. “Many bat species are insectivorous, and so climate change has a big impact on their food sources, as well as on their physiological stress and where they live and how they interact with humans.”
Raina Plowright, an associate professor in the College of Agriculture’s Department of Microbiology and Immunology at MSU, is a trained veterinarian who has also studied ecology.
In addition to the COVID-19 virus, Plowright has studied the Hendra and Nipah viruses, both pathogens that were traced back to bats after causing outbreaks in 1994 and 1998, respectively. She calls the emergence of so many pathogens from one host animal “unprecedented” and focuses her research at MSU on how bats interact with the viruses they carry — and how to prevent spillover events where an animal transmits a virus to a human host.
Unlike the virus that causes COVID-19, said Plowright, neither Nipah nor Hendra virus became widespread because they cannot be transmitted asymptomatically. That made it much easier to identify and isolate infected individuals. However, she calls each potential spillover event a “roll of the dice,” in that it is impossible to know what the emerging virus may look like in a human population.
With the possibility of spillover increasing as animals come into more contact with humans, Plowright said the study of pandemics and the study of climate change are linked, each influencing the other.
“You can imagine a network of food caches across a landscape [for bats],” said Plowright. “Some bats are moving from one patch to the next. … You start taking away those patches, get to a point where there’s no food, so they end up in people’s yards, or at horse stables, or anywhere food is plentiful.”
The full Rolling Stone article can be read at https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/climate-change-risks-infectious-diseases-covid-19-ebola-dengue-1098923/. •
