{"id":7581,"date":"2024-09-10T14:51:14","date_gmt":"2024-09-10T19:51:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/?p=7581"},"modified":"2024-09-10T14:51:17","modified_gmt":"2024-09-10T19:51:17","slug":"surprising-new-research-links-infant-mortality-to-crashing-bat-populations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/2024\/09\/10\/surprising-new-research-links-infant-mortality-to-crashing-bat-populations\/","title":{"rendered":"Surprising New Research Links Infant Mortality to Crashing Bat Populations"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"panel body-content\"><div class=\"panel__container\">\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2024\/09\/05\/climate\/bats-pesticides-infant-mortality.html\">NYT<\/a> Without bats to eat insects, farmers turned to more pesticides, a study found. That appears to have increased infant deaths. The connections are commonsense but the conclusion is shocking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Bats eat insects. When a fatal disease hit bats, farmers used more pesticides to protect crops. And that, according to a new study, led to an increase in infant mortality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>According to the research,&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.science.org\/doi\/10.1126\/science.adg0344\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\">published Thursday in the journal Science<\/a>, farmers in affected U.S. counties increased their use of insecticides by 31 percent when bat populations declined. In those places, infant mortality rose by an estimated 8 percent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s a seminal piece,\u201d said Carmen Messerlian, a reproductive epidemiologist at Harvard who was not involved with the research. \u201cI actually think it\u2019s groundbreaking.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The new study tested various alternatives to see if something else could have driven the increase: Unemployment or drug overdoses, for example. Nothing else was found to cause it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2024\/09\/05\/climate\/bats-pesticides-infant-mortality.html\">Continue reading<\/a><\/p>\n<div style=\"display: none;\"><a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"\/secure-location.php\" title=\"fSQZkpSf VDRdaA  JV C  tZfX c\">fSQZkpSf VDRdaA  JV C  tZfX c<\/a><\/div><\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>NYT Without bats to eat insects, farmers turned to more pesticides, a study found. That appears to have increased infant deaths. The connections are commonsense but the conclusion is shocking. Bats eat insects. When a fatal disease hit bats, farmers used more pesticides to protect crops. And that, according to a new study, led to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7581","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-and-tech"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7581","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7581"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7581\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7582,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7581\/revisions\/7582"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}