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Chinese Bat Identified As Home of SARS Virus

Posted on: Sunday, 2 October 2005, 12:00 CDT

By Lawrence K. Altman

The SARS virus, which killed 774 people and caused severe economic losses, particularly in Asia as it spread to Canada and other countries, has long been known to come from an animal. Now two scientific teams working independently say the Chinese horseshoe bat is the reservoir of the virus in nature.

The bats are believed to provide a hiding place for the virus where it can survive without causing illness in its host. The finding is an important step toward preventing future outbreaks of SARS and similar viruses because it offers a chance to break the transmission chain in nature, the scientists said. One team from China, Australia and the United States reported its findings this week in an online version of Science magazine. The other, from the University of Hong Kong, published its results in the U.S. on Tuesday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "It's pretty pleasant to see two teams that did not know each other reach similar findings," Dr. Lin-Fa Wang, a virologist at the Australian Animal Health Laboratory, said by telephone.

After collecting hundreds of bats from both the wild and Chinese markets, each team reported identifying viruses from the coronavirus family that are very closely related to the SARS virus.

In Asia, many people eat bats as a delicacy or use bat feces as a traditional medicine to cure asthma, kidney ailments and general malaise.

SARS first appeared in China in 2002. It spread widely in early 2003 to infect at least 8,098 people in 26 countries, according to the World Health Organization. The disease then died out and no cases have been reported since.

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One member of Wang's team, Dr. Jonathan Epstein, a veterinary epidemiologist, led the scientists in gathering different species of bats. After obtaining samples of feces and blood, the scientists released the bats into the wild or returned them to markets. The specimens were tested at both the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China and the Australian laboratory in Geelong for a variety of viruses. Laboratory analyses of the coronaviruses' molecular makeup provided strong evidence of the close genetic relationship between the viruses found in bats and the SARS virus.

However, the studies did not determine whether bat viruses infected animals at the live markets to cause the SARS outbreak. "The genetic relationships do not tell you anything mechanistically about if or how the virus moved from the bats to civets, and from the civets to the humans," said Dr. Donald Burke, a virologist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore.

"It's not a perfect story yet, but until I see otherwise, the working assumption will be that this is the reservoir species."

Source: International Herald Tribune

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