Ebola Outbreak May Have Begun With Bats in a Dead Tree.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-12-31/ebola-outbreak-may-have-begun-with-bats-in-a-dead-tree-in-guinea.html

The first patient in West Africa’s devastating Ebola outbreak, a 2-year-old boy in Guinea, may have gotten the disease from bats in a dead tree in his village, a new study reports.

Emile Ouamouno, who died last year on Dec. 6, was a resident of Meliandou, a cluster of 31 houses surrounded by farmland. Locals told researchers that kids used to play in a hollow tree about 50 meters (55 yards) from the boy’s home. Children used to catch and play with long-tailed, insect-eating bats that lived in the tree, which has since burned down, according to the study in the journal EMBO Molecular Medicine.

The findings cast doubt on the theory that the outbreak began with people who ate fruit bats, which are known to carry the Ebola virus. Ouamouno’s family members didn’t hunt fruit bats, and a food-transmitted virus probably would’ve affected others at the same time the boy was sickened, the researchers said. That leaves the insectivores -- known locally as lolibelo and scientifically as Mops condylurus -- as the likely culprit, said the study, led by the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin.

In the future, epidemiologists should widen their samples to include insect-eating bats, the study said. While the researchers advised educating people about contact with bats, they counseled against killing the animals because of the role they play in local ecosystems.

The Ebola outbreak has killed 7,879, almost all of them in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, according to the World Health Organization. In Ouamouno’s family, the sole survivor was his father, who hadn’t lived in the household for several years, the study said.

An Ebola virus virion.