Bats Not Cats to Blame for SARS

by Jarrett Martineau | February 19, 2008 at 03:33 pm

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I knew those bats were up to something -- with their night flying, their sonar systems, and their disease spreading ways...

And it's strange to think that the virus travelled from bats to humans to civets to pigs and then back to humans again.

What goes around comes around, I guess.

Civet cats got a bad rap as the animals that spread SARS to humans, U.S. researchers said Tuesday.

Chinese scientists fingered the civet cat as the SARS agent, but bats are the most likely reason that severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) spread to people, Ohio State University scientists said.

SARS killed 900 people in 2003, including 44 in Canada.

Based on studies of the genome of the virus that caused SARS, “the real story is that civets were not the animal reservoir of SARS," Ohio State biomedical informatics professor Daniel Janies said in a release.

In fact, "the civets actually got SARS from humans," he said.

The researchers found that bats harboured a SARS strain that is the best example of the virus before it infected humans, although there are still problems with the theory because there are missing links in the chain between animals and people.

The U.S. researchers were not the first to suggest bats were the source of SARS, but said they had done the largest and most comprehensive analysis of the origin of coronavirus, which causes SARS.