Human Exposure to Novel Bartonella Species from Contact with Fruit Bats

Twice a year in southwestern Nigeria, during a traditional bat festival, community participants enter designated caves to capture bats, which are then consumed for food or traded. We investigated the presence of Bartonella species in Egyptian fruit bats (Rousettus aegyptiacus) and bat flies (Eucampsipoda africana) from these caves and assessed whether Bartonella infections had occurred in persons from the surrounding communities. Our results indicate that these bats and flies harbor Bartonella strains, which multilocus sequence typing indicated probably represent a novel Bartonella species, proposed as Bartonella rousetti. In serum from 8 of 204 persons, we detected antibodies to B. rousetti without cross-reactivity to other Bartonella species. This work suggests that bat-associated Bartonella strains might be capable of infecting humans.

• Publication year

  2018

• Venue

  Emerging Infectious Diseases

• Publication date

  2018-12-01

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.3201/eid2412.181204PMID 30457529PMCID 6256376
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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