Despite major advances in vaccines, antibiotics and antiviral treatments, infectious diseases still kill 15 million people around the world each year - one quarter of global deaths (Fauci and Morens, 2012). Emerging diseases, caused by new or newly expanding pathogens, form a rapidly changing and intensely challenging front of this international battle. Pathogens that can jump from animals into humans, known as zoonoses, cause over 65% of emerging diseases; three quarters of zoonoses originate in wildlife (Jones et al., 2008). One of the most common sources of human-wildlife contact is through hunting wild animals for food. Researchers have estimated that western and central Africans alone harvest five million tons of bushmeat annually (Fa et al., 2002; Ntiamoa-Baidu, 1998). This massive industry raises concerns across disciplines: not only do epidemiologists fear for the transmission of zoonotic diseases (Daszak, 2000), but conservationists fear for the depletion of threatened and endangered species (Milner-Gulland and Bennett, 2003) and development practitioners worry for the welfare of the communities and people that depend on wild meat for protein and income (Davies, 2002).

Of the many animals hunted for bushmeat, bats pose a number of unanswered questions. Hosting almost sixty viruses that can or do infect humans (Wong et al., 2007), bats globally also are suffering severe population declines due to overhunting (Streubig et al., 2007; Harrison et al., 2011). Yet their roles as reservoirs of human disease, as sources of valuable products, and in human culture are all understudied and largely unexplained. The newly identified presence of henipavirus antibodies and $Bartonella$ bacteria in $Eidolon\; helvum$ fruit bats in Ghana, as well as the potential for commercial hunting of fruit bats, led me to this project in Ghana, West Africa. I set out to: (1) delineate ways in which bats and their pathogens may come into contact with humans; (2) understand how, where and how many bats are hunted, prepared and sold as bushmeat; (3) identify and characterise potentially at-risk populations for bat-borne zoonoses; and (4) determine whether transmission of selected bat-borne pathogens is already occurring within the identified populations.

The urban nature of $E.\; helvum$, the high prevalence of raw palm sap drinking and the large bat bushmeat market all serve as modes of contact between humans and bats. Through 551 interviews with Ghanaians as well as more in depth work with 26 vendors and hunters, I identified demographics as well as perceptions of people involved in bat bushmeat trade. Bat hunting, selling and consumption are widely distributed across region and tribal lines, with hotspots in certain locales; butchering is concentrated in females and active hunters. Interviewees held little belief of disease risk from bats, saw no ecological value of fruit bats outside their economic worth and thought that consumption related to specific tribes. Serological and culture evidence for humans in close contact with bats (by living or working around large $E.\; helvum$ colonies; or through hunting or butchering bats) strongly suggests there is no current spillover of bat-borne $Bartonella$ infections. However, a low prevalence of positive human sera samples for henipavirus antibodies using a Luminex testing platform suggests that there may be human exposure to a henipa-like virus.