OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
In the three decades or so, we have had multiple zoonotic diseases outbreaks caused by bat-borne viruses or viruses with ancestral lineages in bats: Hendra in Australia (first detected in 1994), Nipah in Malaysia/Singapore (1998/9), SARS outbreak (2002/3), MERS outbreak (2012), large scale Ebola virus outbreak (2014) and SARS-CoV-2 (2019/20). Bats are now known as one of, if not, the most important reservoirs of different virus families, yet bats carry these viruses in a largely asymptomatic manner. Bats are also the longest living mamma relative to body size. In this presentation, I will discuss the lessons learnt from studying bat-borne emerging zoonotic viruses and bat immunology in the context of better preparing for future pandemics and translating “bat knowledge” into improving human health in general.
