DAVID MCRAE earned a tragic place in history this week as the first person in Britain to die of a rabies-like virus for a century. He contracted the virus from a bat. Never popular, these creatures are fast becoming pariahs. As a bat conservationist, McRae would have been horrified to hear that the official conservation agency English Nature has received calls from people wanting to evict bats from their homes.
A knee-jerk reaction against bats is misguided. There is little evidence that the offending pathogen, a European bat lyssavirus, is endemic to Britain, as it is to continental Europe. A…
