Breathless: The Scientific Race to Defeat a Deadly Virus

by David Quammen

Altamont Speedway

Ali Khan is another expert who saw the small, dark dot on the horizon. When I first met him, in 2006, he was deputy director of the National Center for Zoonotic, Vector-borne, and Enteric Diseases (NCZVED), which is part of the United States CDC, and therefore he was tasked with dreaming pandemic nightmares in daylight.

So the team began asking local people, with Fagbo as interpreter: Do you have any bats around here? The Arabic word for bats, to Epstein’s recollection, sounds like “huffa-fish.” So here were five men, including Epstein—who is tall and short-haired, and in khakis as he was then could pass for a major in the U.S. Marines—roaming around Bisha, showing people pictures of the bats and asking for leads. Epstein even climbed to some overlooks in the hills, scanning with his binoculars to try to spot bats flying up at dusk. Fagbo warned him: “Don’t point those binoculars towards anyone’s house because they will immediately assume, you know, you’re looking at their family.” Finally, a man in a vehicle said, Yes, come, I’ll take you to them. They jumped in the man’s car, almost without thinking. Later it seemed injudicious. “If there’s ever a textbook definition of what not to do when you’re in another country,” Epstein told me, chuckling at his lapse in caution, “never having been there before, not speaking the language—you don’t get into a car with a total stranger who says, ‘Yes, I’ll show you where the bats are. They’re just outside of town.’ ” Especially you don’t jump into that car if you look like a Marine officer doing recon.

The team caught bats inside the cave with fixed nets and also outside, as the animals flew out for a night’s foraging, then swab-sampled them, took blood, and released them. Handling a fruit bat can be difficult because some of them are large and strong, they have sharp teeth and big claws, and in their understandable fervor to escape, they will climb up your arm to your face if you hold them the wrong way. Now imagine extracting a few drops of blood from a very small vein along the animal’s arm, or in the membrane that attaches to the leg. It’s a two-person job with a steepish learning curve, perilous for both the bats and the people. If you get bit, you’ll want a rabies booster pronto.

A furin cleavage site is a sort of trigger within the spike protein of a coronavirus (or an equivalent protein in other viruses) that enhances the capacity of the virus to latch on to and enter cells.