"Vaccinating bats would be a more gentle approach—but it isn’t easy. “We can't be going around and injecting wild animals with vaccines,” says the paper’s corresponding author, Tonie Rocke, an epidemiologist with the U.S. Geological Service National Wildlife Health Center. “We wouldn't get very far if we tried to do that.”

So instead her team built on the vampiricide approach. They took an oral vaccine experimentally shown to prevent bats from shedding the rabies virus—which would make them harmless to cattle—and mixed it with a carboxymethyl cellulose gel, a thickening agent also used in human food products. They also added a fluorescent compound to the gel to help them track its distribution across the colony."

Read the full article here on the Science.org website.