Studying live bats in US laboratories could pose an outbreak risk much like the lab in Wuhan, China that authorities warned was ripe for human disease transmission, according to officials and activists.

“It’s a similar risk,” said Nick Atwood, campaigns coordinator for the Animal Rights Foundation of Florida, which cited several potentially dangerous live bat studies. “By international standards, the lab in Wuhan was top of the line — and if [risk] was a problem there, it could certainly be a problem here.”

US Officials backed that claim in a memo sent to US researchers earlier this month, recommending they stop the use of live bats.

“Until we have a better understanding of the risk to bats posed by [the coronavirus] we recommend that people consider temporarily postponing activities requiring direct contact with wild bats,” the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said in the April 1 letter obtained by The Post.

American labs that are studying or have recently published studies with live bats include a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia and the National Institutes of Health biomedical research facility in Hamilton, Montana, according to reports.

The research includes a study of the SARS-like “WIV1-coronavirus” in fruit bats, and the “oral shedding” of the Marburg virus in fruit bats. The Colorado State University in Fort Collins was also conducting live bat experiments as of February.

Earlier this week, a State Department message surfaced showing that officials sent out a warning in 2018 that the Wuhan Institute of Virology — which used live bats to study coronaviruses — posed a risk of sparking a new SARS-like pandemic.

In the Jan. 2018 memo, officials cautioned that the lab had a “serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians” and few “investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory,” according to the Washington Post.

The lab — which was China’s first to achieve the highest level of international bioresearch safety known as  “BSL-4”— operated with safety standards on par with live bat labs in the US, according to activist and experts.

“They have high biosafety levels but part of problem [in Wuhan] was a lack of adequately trained employees,” Atwood said. “We’ve seen budget cuts and  cutting staff at US Universities due to the virus. I hope that’ doesn’t translate  into something horrible happening, and people getting infected here.”

J. Alan Clark a conservation biology professor at Fordham University said, that despite worry about the study of bats, the fascinating flying mammals may hold the key to future pandemic prevention.

“Bats are amazing creatures because they have a highly unusual immune system that allows them to be exposed to a lot of pathogens without getting sick,” he said. “There’s been a huge increase in research to better understand how bats do that — because we want to do that.”

He added, “It’s a really exciting area of immunology research. Of course there is always the risk of contagion.”

US intelligence officials are now reportedly investigating whether the virus originated at the lab — instead of an open-air market— and was accidentally released to the public, sparking the coronavirus pandemic.

The State Department declined to comment to The Post on Friday. The CDC didn’t return a request for comment.