Welcome to Season 4 of Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

I'm Josh Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, and a former Commissioner of Health in Baltimore City.

Our goal is to bring

scientific evidence and experience to current topics in public health through engaging interviews

with scientists, community leaders, policy experts, public health officials, clinicians, and more.

If you have ideas or questions for us to cover, please email us at public health question at jhhhu.edu.

That's public health question at jhhu.edu for future podcast episodes.

Hi, I'm Lindsay Smith-Rogers, producer of Public Health On Call, and today it's our Halloween episode.

The topic, bats.

Josh Starvstein talks to Dr. Emily Gurley and infectious disease epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins.

They discuss why bats are so important to public health, what it's like to work with bats,

and the difference between bats and hang-ups about bats. Let's listen.

Dr. Emily Gurley, thank you so much for joining me for our special Halloween episode of

Public Health on Call. Happy to be here. Love Halloween and love Public Health on call. So two of my favorite things.

And our topic today is bats. And we want to ask you some questions about bats. So are you

prepared for that? Can't wait. Okay. So the first question is bats and public health.

Why are bats important for public health? Well, for some reason, reasons that are not entirely clear and that are an active area of investigation,

many of the emerging zoonotic infections that pose a threat to public health

have originated in pets. So, you know, humans infected with bat viruses isn't that rare.

You know, we know that somewhere along along the way, SARS coronavirus too came from a bat.

But even since the pandemic began, there are numerous examples of other viruses that have infected humans from bats.

Even in the past year, Ebola outbreaks, those viruses come from bats.

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