Boy playing in bat-filled tree may have been Ebola outbreak’s ‘patient zero’
Researchers believe a two-year-old boy playing in an infested tree in southeastern Guinea sparked deadly epidemic engulfing West Africa
A team of researchers think they have pinpointed how the Ebola epidemic in West Africa started — with a small boy playing in a hollowed-out tree where infected bats lived.
The researchers explored an area in southeastern Guinea where two-year-old Emile Ouamouno fell ill a year ago and died. Health officials believe he was "patient zero" in the epidemic, which wasn't recognised until the spring.
The Ebola virus wasn't found in the bats they tested, the scientists reported in a study published on Tuesday. But they came away believing that the boy got it from the bats that had lived in the hollow tree.
The fruit bat has long been suspected of sparking the ongoing epidemic in West Africa, but the new research suggests it may have been an insect-eating bat that first transmitted the virus to a human host. The Ebola epidemic is the worst in world history, blamed for killing nearly 8,000 people across West Africa this year.
The epidemic's exact origin has never been determined, but the virus is thought to spread to people from some sort of animal. Many experts have suspected some species of bat, though some wonder if West Africa's epidemic started through another animal - such as a chimpanzee or small antelope - that was perhaps infected by bats and then were eaten by people.
The researchers saw no signs that Ebola had affected larger animals around the boy's small village of Meliandou. They also found no evidence of the virus in their tests of 169 bats, including fruit bats.
Then they learned that a large colony of insectivorous bats with long tails lived in a hollow tree near the boy's home.