By May, it had been determined that two of the prime reservoirs for the disease were masked palm civets and ferret-badgers, native to the Guangdong region and sold in local markets there as food. So the transmission to humans was probably similar to that of Ebola when locals in rural west-central Africa ate infected bushmeat. Further research indicated that the civets and badgers had most likely caught the virus from bats sometime in the months to years before the outbreak.
