By Susan Milius
A bat species may be more likely than a rodent to carry viruses known to jump from other animals to people, a new study suggests.
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Per species, bats also harbor more known viruses in total than rodents do, including wildlife-only infections as well as those that also infect people, says Angela Luis of Colorado State University in Fort Collins. And a bat virus on average has a greater number of species it can infect, Luis and her colleagues report February 1 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Recent years have brought headlines about scary viruses jumping from bats to people. The virus that caused the global SARS outbreak in 2003 and South Asia’s emerging Nipah virus have been traced to bats. Rodents, in the meantime, spread other emerging diseases such as hantavirus pulmonary syndrome and Lassa hemorrhagic fever.