MONROVIA, Liberia – The Director of the National Public Health Institute of Liberia, Tolbert Nyenswah, announced today at a press conference in the capital Monrovia that a recent research shows that the deadly Ebola Virus was found in a bat in the country.
This bat species may be the source of the Ebola epidemic that killed more than 11,000 people in West Africa, specifically in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone.
Although the results of the research is yet to be published, the Liberian government and other PREDICT partners “felt that this was an important finding to bring to the public irrespective of a scientific publication,” says team member Simon Anthony, a virologist at Columbia University in New York City.
The huge Ebola epidemic that struck West Africa between 2013 and 2016 took the world by surprise. The virus had never been found in the region; all previous Ebola outbreaks were in countries in Central Africa or Sudan. And it posed a mystery: Where did the virus, called Ebola Zaire, come from?
Now, scientists may have an answer. Near the mouth of an abandoned mineshaft in Liberia, they caught a bat that was likely infected with Ebola Zaire.
The researchers didn’t isolate the virus itself but found about one fifth of its genome in the animal; it’s too early to tell whether it’s exactly the same strain as the one that ravaged the region. Still, “This is an important new lead and it should be followed up extensively,” says Fabian Leendertz, a veterinary epidemiologist at the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin who was not involved in the work.
The finding also sheds new light on the natural history of Ebola, which has befuddled scientists for decades, says Jon Epstein, a veterinary epidemiologist at EcoHealthAlliance in New York City and a member of the PREDICT consortium that made the discovery.
“It is really our first evidence of any bat carrying Ebola Zaire virus in the region,” Epstein says. “It allows us to take a deeper look and try to understand where this virus came from.”
Scientists have long suspected that bats were a natural host of Ebola and a source of some human infections, but until now they had not found any bats that harbored the epidemic species, known as Zaire ebolavirus.
Although the bat was found in Liberia, the country has not had any human cases of Ebola since 2016, and the bat was not associated with any illness in people.
The finding is preliminary and not yet ready for publication in a peer-reviewed journal, the usual venue for presenting scientific discoveries. Only 20 percent of the bat’s genome has been studied, and research on it is continuing.
