You're listening to virus hunters in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

They are checking under local bat population testing the animals for potential pathogens.

As you may know, bats are well-known vectors or hosts for viruses and bacteria that could

jump from animals to humans.

They include coronaviruses, like SARS and MERS, and viruses that cause hemorrhagic

fevers, like Ebola and Marburg.

When they spill over into humans and cause illness, we call these zoonotic diseases.

Although we still don't know the exact origin of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, the

prevailing theory is that it circulated in bats and then most likely jumped to an unknown

animal before then spilling over into humans, possibly at a wet market in China where live

animals were sold and then butchered for meat.

Now we are going to put it in the cup chabag.

When you've got hemorrhagic, we have cup chabag just over there.

You have to be really careful all the bite.

The researchers know that a single bat bite could become the start of the next pandemic.

There are eight bats just in this net alone.

Now a local man who just passed us as we are arriving told us that they did locally eat

bats but bigger, fatter ones than these that they catch in the trees.

Now these ecologists have said that they haven't yet discovered traces of the Ebola virus

as such but they have found the antibody, a similar situation that has been seen in China

where the bats are seen as part of the process of the spread of COVID but perhaps not the

original source.

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