People are understandably a little jumpy when you bring up bats and viruses these days. And yet, some people were not jumpy enough.

Researchers are now basically begging people to please stop walking into a cave filled with bats known to host a pathogen that can make you bleed from your eyes. According to a recent study published in Current Biology, Python Cave in Uganda is a major incubator for the Marburg virus, one of the world’s most lethal pathogens.

Marburg belongs to the same family as Ebola, and it’s about as nasty as its viral cousin. There is no vaccine for it, and according to the World Health Organization, it has a fatality ratio of up to 88 percent. Symptoms escalate from a simple fever and muscle pain to full-blown hemorrhaging from all orifices and eventually organ failure.

It’s the kind of illness that, if you told me existed primarily in one cave filled with bats, I would naturally avoid that cave. People have not been avoiding the cave.

A Cave in Uganda Is Crawling With Virus Bats, and People Won’t Stay Away

Researchers set up camera traps in Python Cave over months of observation and recorded more than 300 animal encounters across at least 14 species, including leopards, monkeys, birds, and reptiles. They were all mingling with the Egyptian fruit bats that the virus calls home. The bats themselves don’t get sick; they are living, breathing incubators of it, never getting rid of it, but always able to pass it on.

The researchers observed some animals wandering in, which makes sense. Can’t stop nature. But then they saw at least 214 instances of people either walking up to or straight up entering the cave, ignoring the guidelines to stay at least 30 meters away from it. It was people from all walks of life, including students, tourists, and other researchers. Of the 214 instances of people lingering in or around the cave, the researchers noticed only one person was wearing any protective gear.

It’s like people are actively trying to start Pandemic 2: The Final Reckoning. It’s all a textbook example of how viruses jump from animals to humans and, eventually, potentially, spark widespread outbreaks.

All it takes is one infection to spark a chain reaction; thankfully, no one has gotten infected in quite some time. The last cases were a pair of tourists back in the late 2010s, one of whom died a week after symptoms arose. I think I speak for all of humanity when I say let’s keep it that way by making sure that absolutely no human steps foot in the Bat cave teeming with Ebola cousin.