The hunter and the doomsday virus

摘要

It's important to find out where these viruses live so we can get people to avoid them. We and colleagues tested thousands of ground-dwelling animals, insects and birds, and didn't find it, but the evidence suggested it had to be in bats. We netted bats in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Gabon and scoured the forest canopy in Ivory Coast, but it's hard to find the few bats that are infected. We eventually found evidence in bats in a mine in the DRC where there was a long history of miners suffering a Marburg-like disease.