Was Bear Gryll’s exposed to rabies?

I’ve been watching that show ‘Man vs. Wild’ on Discovery channel. If you haven’t seen it yet, you might want to tune in. Discovery has a schedule on the web (see http://dsc.discovery.com).

I first happened upon ‘Man vs. Wild’ just channel surfing, but within a few minutes of watching, I was hooked. Here was some great TV – which is hard to find these days. I don’t know why television in general is so pandering – I often wonder why the networks just don’t strive to make great programs and worry about the audiences secondarily. I think ‘build it and they will come’ should apply –even though it might seem riskier. Just consider the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy for example – what a Masterpiece!

Anyway, here’s this guy Bear Grylls, who by some miracle survived and recovered from a broken back after a parachuting accident. Now his assignment is to lead the viewer through some harrowing wilderness challenge. The show is a great mix of adventure, amazing natural beauty, perseverance, intelligence and ultimately triumph. I think this program inspires hope. I may not get outdoors that much, but I feel like I could spring into the back yard at any time, climb over the fence and into the wild mountains beyond.

I’ve seen many ‘cord’ victims in my career, since my training hospital had a spinal cord center. I dreaded to see them, since paralysis is such an awful curse. As a doctor, you wish you could do more, but with devastating neural injury, sometimes there was just nothing you could do. Bear must have been very lucky and I’m sure a miracle occurred there.

I’m hoping Bear’s luck holds out. Last week I saw his ‘Panama’ episode, where he and the crew traverse through a bat infested cave in pitch darkness. He didn’t report the species of bat, although he suggested they were vampire bats – Desmodus rotundus. Whether or not that was the correct species is irrelevant, since rabies is actually a ‘bat’ virus and could be transmitted by any number of bat species.

A new bat species - the Mindoro Fruitbat!

I was very pleased to hear about a recent ’small miracle’ in the world of biodiversity. A new bat species was found in the Philippines according to scientists reporting in the Journal of Mammalogy.

(see Esselstyn JA (2007) A NEW SPECIES OF STRIPE-FACED FRUIT BAT (CHIROPTERA: PTEROPODIDAE: STYLOCTENIUM) FROM THE PHILIPPINES.
Journal of Mammalogy: Vol. 88, No. 4 pp. 951–958

Apparently this is a fruit-eating bat or ‘flying fox’, with orange fur and three white stripes on its face. Flying foxes are quite unlike the bats we have fluttering around over our heads in North America. These animals have fox-like faces with reddish fur and are quite large. Mostly they feed on fruits and are extremely important ecologically, as anyone from Bat Conservation International can tell you.

I remember with fascination visiting the Subic Bay area of Luzon, Philippines and seeing an enormous colony of these creatures, right behind our hotel! It was called ‘Bat Kingdom’ and fortunately was a protected area.