Bats are the major reservoir of coronaviruses worldwide

Date: June 12, 2017

Source: Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health

Results of a five-year study in 20 countries on three continents have found that bats harbor a large diversity of coronaviruses (CoV), the family of viruses that cause Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (SARS) and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (MERS). Findings from the study -- led by scientists in the USAID-funded PREDICT project at the Center for Infection and Immunity (CII) at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health and the University of California, Davis' One Health Institute in the School of Veterinary Medicine -- are published in the journal Virus Evolution. PREDICT is a globally coordinated effort to detect and discover viruses of pandemic potential and reduce risk for future epidemics.

With the cooperation of local governments, researchers sampled and tested 19,192 bats, rodents, non-human primates, and humans in areas where the risk of animal-to-human transmission is greatest, including sites of deforestation, ecotourism, and animal sanctuaries. The researchers identified 100 different CoVs and found that more than 98 percent of the animals harboring these viruses were bats, representing 282 bat species from 12 taxonomic families. Extrapolating to all 1,200 bat species, they estimate a total of 3,204 CoV are carried by bats worldwide, most of which have yet to be detected and described. They also found that CoV diversity correlated with bat diversity with high numbers of CoVs concentrated in areas where there are the most bat species, suggesting CoVs coevolved with or adapted to preferred families of bats.

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