and the signal to all sorts of cells that have not become infected, a virus is here. turn on your defense system. and typically this manifests in inflammation. the in humans inflammation helps fight fever. too long, it can do more harm than good. it can even cause death. typically more than half the damage that results in disease tends to be the damage of the immune system attacking the disease itself. that s how the disease stops. but bats immune systems don t respond the same way as humans. it seems that bats are able to mount robust immune responses but not experience that inflammation. some bat species are actually missing the genes that we and other mammals have that trigger the inflammatory process.
reporter: omar jimenez, cnn, chicago. omar, thank you so much for that. a programming note for all of you. you can say good-bye to 2020 finally and hello to 2021 with anderson cooper and andy cohen live from times square new year s eve starting at 8:00 p.m. eastern on cnn. thank you so much for joining me. i m kate bolduan. happy new year. merry christmas. the cnn special bats: the mystery behind covid starts now. announcer: the following is a cnn special report. bats throughout human history seem to have this image as evil, dark and dangerous. they seem to have got this bad impression in our cultures. there is definitely something odd about them. but just because they re odd doesn t mean they re bad.
reporter: omar jimenez, cnn, chicago. omar, thank you so much for that. a programming note for all of you. you can say good-bye to 2020 finally and hello to 2021 with anderson cooper and andy cohen live from times square new year s eve starting at 8:00 p.m. eastern on cnn. thank you so much for joining me. i m kate bolduan. happy new year. merry christmas. the cnn special bats: the mystery behind covid starts now. announcer: the following is a cnn special report. bats throughout human history seem to have this image as evil, dark and dangerous. they seem to have got this bad impression in our cultures. there is definitely something odd about them. but just because they re odd
the same adaptation also carries virus. it doesn t appear to get sick or very sick when they re carrying viruses that can be deadly in other people and animals. so, could studying bat immunology help us humans create possible treatments to fight this current and future pandemic? what do you think is the greatest challenge in term of finding a treatment or cure for these virus? to my mind, the greatest challenge, the number of unknown viruses that are out there. we think there are about 1.7 million unknown viruses of the type that can get into people. and we ve got to get ready for these. find out what there are out there, get vaccines and drugs for not just the ones we know about, but the ones we re discovering right now. bats already contribute enormously to research that could one day be helpful to humans. they re being studied to see how
miles from wuhan, researchers in berkeley california are looking to bats to find clues to help fight coronaviruses like covid-19. in a way there s a lot we can learn from bats. this group of animals has been around for millions of years. how can we look at their history with viruses and take that knowledge and think about therapeutics and treatments for ourselves? what is it about bats that allows some of them to host these viruses without showing any illness? that s the question that kara brook is trying to answer. brook is a disease ecology who began studying bats in madagascar in 2012. she and her colleagues are investigating how the bats immunity keeps them safe from harm. zb i ve always been fascinated by bats as host sources of infectious diseases that transmit to humans. in the case of certain bat species, they appear to be