Bats Carry Many Viruses. So Why Don't They Get Sick?

"Like Ebola virus in Africa and the Nipah virus in Asia, the new coronavirus — 2019-nCoV — appears to have originated in bats."

"Chinese researchers took samples of the coronavirus from patients in Wuhan, the city in central China where the outbreak was first detected."

"They compared the genetic sequence of the new coronavirus — 2019-nCoV — to a library of known viruses and found a 96% match with a coronavirus found in horseshoe bats in southwest China. The findings were published in a study in Nature this week."

"'They're too close in terms of their pure genetics to say they're not related, or that they didn't have a common ancestor,' says Vineet Menachery, a virologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston who was not affiliated with the study."

"Menachery and many other researchers think this new coronavirus spread from bats to humans, with a possible stop with another animal in between."

"It's happened with other coronaviruses. In the case of the SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) outbreak, from 2002-2003, a bat coronavirus jumped to civets, a member of the mongoose family, and was sold to people as food at markets. The MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome) outbreak, first detected in 2012, was caused by a coronavirus that jumped from bats to camels to people who maybe drank raw camel milk or ate undercooked meat."