The US Fish and Wildlife Service has a White-Nose Syndrome (WNS) information page that reveals American scientists are struggling to stop this serious health crisis:

In February 2006 some 40 miles west of Albany, N.Y., a caver photographed hibernating bats with an unusual white substance on their muzzles. He noticed several dead bats. The following winter, bats behaving erratically, bats with white noses, and a few hundred dead bats in several caves came to the attention of New York Department of Environmental Conservation biologists, who documented white-nose syndrome in January 2007. More than a million hibernating bats have died since. Biologists with state and federal agencies and organizations across the country are still trying to find the answer to this deadly mystery.

We have found sick, dying and dead bats in unprecedented numbers in and around caves and mines from New Hampshire to Tennessee. In some hibernacula, 90 to 100 percent of the bats are dying.

Since then the Forest Service has said that they are initiating severe counter-measures to stop humans from spreading the fungus Geomyces destructans.

The U.S. Forest Service Rocky Mountain Region has issued an emergency order closing caves and abandoned mines on national forests and national grasslands in Colorado, Wyoming, South Dakota, Nebraska and Kansas for one year in response to the spread of WNS.

However, the problem continues to get worse and some experts say it soon may lead to American bat extinction.

“We are now at the front line in fighting this disease,” said Dave Redell, DNR’s lead bat ecologist. “The next three to four years are crucial. If white-nose syndrome reaches Wisconsin, we are looking at potentially losing almost all of our cave-dwelling bat populations.”

Bats play an absolutely essential role in pest control as well as other areas of environmental stability that affect humans — their loss will lead directly to much higher risks of crop loss and disease from insects. Yet WNS seems to be an example of a real virus crisis that gets very little attention in the media compared to mostly theoretical low-risk events like the Stuxnet computer virus.