How studying bats can help predict and prevent the next deadly pandemic
Flying foxes. Getty This story was originally published by ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox. Dressed head-to-toe in protective gear, Peggy Eby crawled on her hands and knees under a fig tree, searching for bat droppings and fruit with telltale fang marks. Another horse in Australia had died from the dreaded Hendra virus that winter in 2011. For years, the brain-inflaming infectious disease had bedeviled the country, leaping from bats to horses and sometimes from horses to humans. Hendra was as fatal as it was mysterious, striking in a seemingly random fashion. Experts fear that if the virus mutates, it could jump from person to person and wreak havoc. So while government veterinarians screened other horses,...