Spillover: the powerful, prescient book that predicted the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic.

by David Quammen

Working in one of the CDC’s BSL-4 units, Towner and his co-workers had isolated viable, replicating Marburg virus from five different bats. Furthermore, the five strains of virus were genetically diverse, suggesting an extended history of viral presence and evolution within Egyptian fruit bats. Those data, plus the fragmentary RNA, constituted strong evidence that the Egyptian fruit bat is a reservoir—if not the reservoir—of Marburg virus. Based on the isolation work, it’s definitely there in the bats. Based on the RNA fragments, it seems to infect about 5 percent of the bat population at a given time. Putting those numbers together with the overall population estimate of a hundred thousand bats at Kitaka, the team could say that about five thousand Marburg-infected bats flew out of the cave every night. An interesting thought: five thousand infected bats passing overhead. Where were they going? How far to the fruiting trees? Whose livestock or little gardens got shat upon as they went? Jon Epstein’s advice would have been apt: “Keep your mouth closed when you look up.” And the Kitaka aggregation, Towner and his coauthors added, “is only one of many such cave populations11 throughout Africa.

Marburg is found in bats