Troubling Treat: Guam mystery disease from bat entrée?
By Susan Milius
A famous unsolved medical puzzle of last century–why a neurological disease spiked on Guam–may hinge on the local tradition of serving boiled bat.
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After World War II, doctors noticed that the Chamorro people of Guam experienced 100 times as high an incidence of diseases resembling amyotrophic lateral sclerosis than people in the continental United States do. Last year, scientists proposed that when large local bats called flying foxes (Pteropus mariannus) dine on seeds of the cycad plant, they accumulate high concentrations of neurotoxins, which transfer to people who eat the bats. Now, ethnobotanist Paul Alan Cox of the National Tropical Botanical Garden in Kalaheo, Hawaii, and his colleagues report that the rise and fall of the disease tracks an increase and then decrease in human consumption of local bats.