Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

by David Quammen

The DPI team also tested old samples from flying foxes, which had been archived for more than a dozen years. Again, they found telltale molecular tracks of Hendra. This showed that the bat population had been exposed to Hendra virus long before it struck Vic Rail’s horses. And then, in September 1996, two years after the Rail outbreak, a pregnant grey-headed flying fox got herself snagged on a wire fence. She miscarried twin fetuses and was euthanized. Not only did she test positive for antibodies; she also made possible the first isolation of Hendra virus from a bat. A sample of her uterine fluids yielded live virus, and that virus proved indistinguishable from Hendra as found in horses and humans. It was enough, even within scientific bounds of caution, to identify flying foxes as the “probable” reservoir hosts of Hendra.