A year after the second field trip, this team published a paper containing some of these details (including the forest cobras) and one headline result: they had isolated live virus from five of the bats. The reservoir host—or anyway, a reservoir host—of Marburg virus had been found. It was safe to say, thanks to Towner and Amman and Swanepoel and their colleagues, that the outbreaks at Kitaka and Durba, probably also those cases linked to the cave on Mount Elgon, and possibly too the virus in the African monkeys shipped to Europe in 1967, originated from Egyptian fruit bats. That discovery had
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