lations, he says. Because bats are hunted so much, if the Ebola virus were widespread, “we’d see infections all the time.”
Peter Walsh of the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, who studies Ebola in wildlife in Central Africa, says the evidence linking the outbreak to the bat tree is frustratingly indirect. “It is suggestive, but it certainly doesn’t rise to a ‘smoking gun’ level,” he says. The wildlife surveys were too small to convincingly rule out an outbreak in wild animals, he adds.
Leendertz agrees, but notes that there is little intact forest around Meliandou, which would limit contact with wildlife. And the fact that children and women, rather than hunters, were the first people known to be infected also suggests that eating bush meat or contact with forest-dwelling animals is relatively unlikely to have sparked this outbreak. He and his colleagues are continuing to sample bats and other wildlife in the region—most recently from Ivory Coast, close to the Guinean border. In Guinea, he says, surveys aren’t possible at the moment. With the Ebola epidemic still raging there, “people are very suspicious,” he says—especially of anyone who wants to capture bats.
*The Ebola Files: Given the current Ebola outbreak, unprecedented in terms of number of people killed and rapid geographic spread, Science and Science Translational Medicinehave made a collection of research and news articles on the viral disease freely available to researchers and the general public.