Long a suspected source of the virus, bats had not been confirmed as carriers of the lethal disease in West Africa before. The discovery could help scientists learn more about how the virus infects humans.
For the first time, the type of deadly Ebola virus responsible for recent epidemics has been found in a bat in West Africa, Liberian health officials announced on Thursday.
Bats carrying the disease had already been found in Central Africa, and scientists have long suspected that bats were a natural host of Ebola and a source of some human infections in other areas as well. But until now they had not found any bats in West Africa that harbored the epidemic species, known as Zaire ebolavirus.
Although the bat was found in Liberia, the country has not had any human cases of Ebola since 2016, and the bat was not associated with any illness in people.
The finding is preliminary and not yet ready for publication in a peer-reviewed journal, the usual venue for presenting scientific discoveries. Only 20 percent of the bat’s genome has been studied, and research on it is continuing.
But because of its potential impact on public health, officials in Liberia wanted to share the information widely as soon as possible.
“It’s an incomplete study, a work in progress,” said Simon J. Anthony, a virologist at Columbia University who has performed genetic analyses on samples from the infected bat. “It feels premature scientifically, but on the other hand, you have the public health aspect. We do have enough data to suggest to me that it is Ebola Zaire in this bat. We agree with our Liberian government partners that this information should be shared.”
Knowing which types of bat carry Ebola may help health officials prevent outbreaks by educating the public about how to prevent contact with the creatures, scientists said. The newly implicated bat roosts in caves and mines, so people can be warned to avoid those places.
But Dr. Anthony said there were probably more bat species, with different habitats, that might also carry the virus.
Avoiding caves is clear-cut advice, but other routes of infection may be harder to block: People in many parts of the world eat bats, and may be infected while catching or preparing them for cooking. Hunters and cooks may not be able to tell one bat species from another.
The researchers said the findings did not mean that bats should be exterminated. They protect humans and crops by eating insects and pollinating fruit trees. Disrupting complex ecosystems by slaughtering bats could even make disease outbreaks worse.
Zaire ebolavirus is the cause of the current epidemic in the Democratic Republic of Congo, with more than 700 cases and more than 400 deaths. The outbreak, which has spun out of control in a war-torn region, is the second largest ever. The largest, caused by the same Ebola species, occurred in West Africa from 2013 to 2016, infecting nearly 30,000 people and killing 11,000.
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