Bats and You

There are a lot of myths about bats, and quite a few people are filled with irrational fears of them, but slowly and steadily people are beginning to understand the truth about them.

But not all cultures believe that bats are terrible creatures of the night that are out to get you. Such as in China where bats are good luck. On the other hand being popular is not always good for the bat. For instance on the island of Guam the Chamorro people celebrate the existence of fruit bats by eating them in ceremonial dishes. Now the bats are almost all extinct, they are eaten so much by the natives!

The main reason that people are scared of bats is that they are uneducated about them, thinking that bats fly down at you and entangle themselves in your hair or imbed themselves in your hair, when in actual fact as with most wild animals, they will be more scared of you than you of them and would most probably fly away from you than confront you, in fact you'll be luckily to even see one close enough to get scared of it anyway.

The other thing that people think is that bats spread rabies and parasites and that having bat guano in your roof is going to give you fatal lung diseases. Most bats do not carry rabies, The only South American Vampire Bats that only make up 1% of bats and only 31 people in the US are ever recorded to have died of bat borne diseases compared to the annual average of deaths contracted form dogs! The parasites on bats are no danger to us because they mostly have specialized preferences for hosts, Humans not included. As for the lung diseases(or Histoplasmosis) caused by bats, all it is fungus that grows in bat or bird droppings which become airborne when the guano is disturbed and is then inhaled and live in the lungs. It may sound bad but in 100,000 to 500,000 cases prove to be serious while all the others drift over, being mistaken for mild flu. Yet again all this proves that bats are harmless.