The Angolan free-tailed bat (Mops condylurus)JAKOB FAHRAlthough researchers have not yet definitively identified the source of the Ebola virus that has killed nearly 8,000 people and sickened many more in West Africa this year, a large international team of scientists this week (December 30) suggested that the epidemic may have jumped from bats to humans near a small Guinean village. This past April, Fabian Leendertz, an epidemiologist at the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin, led researchers in a search for animals harboring Ebola in southeastern Guinea, the country that reported some of the first cases of the current epidemic. The researchers did not find populations of wild animals dying from Ebola, as often occurs in conjunction with outbreaks in humans, and none of the 169 bats they sampled turned up positive for the virus. But the team did hear of a hollow Cola tree that harbored thousands of Angolan free-tailed bats (Mops condylurus) near Meliandou, the tiny village that was home to a 2-year-old boy who died from Ebola in December 2013, the first reported case of Ebola in the West African epidemic. “If we know the reservoir and we understand the dynamics in the reservoir, it could help us to focus mobilization campaigns or education campaigns,” Leendertz told The Scientist in October, as he and his coauthors awaited word on the publication of the manuscript, which appeared in EMBO Molecular Medicine today (December 30).
While the results contain no direct evidence of bats infected with Ebola near Meliandou (the confirmed epicenter of the Ebola outbreak), Leendertz suggested that the toddler could have picked up the virus from bats by playing in or near the Cola tree, which was burnt before his team had a chance to investigate it. “There must have been thousands of bats in there,” he told Science. “That is more exposure than you can get by hunting individual bats.”
Wildlife biologist Peter Walsh of the University of Cambridge in the U.K. told Science these latest results implicating bats are interesting, but that the evidence is not robust enough to lay the blame for starting the Ebola epidemic. “It is suggestive, but it certainly doesn’t rise to ...
