Question: How do you obtain the viruses you study in bats?

Keith Grehan answered on 20 Jun 2014:

There are a couple of different ways, sometimes a team of researchers are doing field work and they will take blood samples from wild bats to specifically look for diseases, this is how H17N10 and H18N11 two new types of flu were discovered in bats.
Other times when people get sick with something the virus will be isolated by scientists from samples taken from a patient. In this case scientists will then begin the hunt for the cause of the disease and if they think there is a chance that it is linked to animals (bats or other animals ) then field teams will be sent to collect samples from lots of different animals. This is really tough since mostly the teams only have guesses to work on…and in some cases they literally have to take blood samples from every single animal and bird they can find
This is what happened with Ebola virus which first came to international attention in the 1970’s. Researchers were immediately sent from all over the world to investigate and they quickly realised it must have originally spread to people from animals but had no idea which one. So far it has taken 30 years of work and thousands of animals have been tested and we still dont 100% know which animals carry the virus. We do think its most likely bats and in 2013 a team published some really good work making a strong case for this….but it could still be something else so that shows how tricky this work can be.