Exposure to diverse sarbecoviruses indicates frequent zoonotic spillover in human communities interacting with wildlife

Background: Sarbecoviruses are a subgenus of Coronaviridae that mostly infect bats with known potential to infect humans (SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2). Populations in Southeast Asia, where these viruses are most likely to emerge, have been undersurveyed to date. Methods: We surveyed communities engaged in extractive industries and bat guano harvesting from rural areas in Myanmar. Participants were screened for exposure to sarbecoviruses, and their interactions with wildlife were evaluated to determine the factors associated with exposure to sarbecoviruses.Results: Of 693 people screened between July 2017 and February 2020, 12.1% were seropositive for sar-becoviruses. Individuals were significantly more likely to have been exposed to sarbecoviruses if their main livelihood involved working in extractive industries (logging, hunting, or harvesting of forest prod-ucts; odds ratio [OR] = 2.71, P = 0.019) or had been hunting/slaughtering bats (OR = 6.09, P = 0.020). Exposure to a range of bat and pangolin sarbecoviruses was identified.Conclusion: Exposure to diverse sarbecoviruses among high-risk human communities provides epidemio-logic and immunologic evidence that zoonotic spillover is occurring. These findings inform risk mitigation effort s needed to decrease disease transmission at the bat-human interface, as well as future surveillance efforts warranted to monitor isolated populations for viruses with pandemic potential.(c) 2023 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of International Society for Infectious Diseases. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ )