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The article focuses on a report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on June 12, 2019 which found 70 percent of the 89 deaths resulting from rabies exposure from 1960 to 2019 were caused by bats and mentions less than one percent of bats overall are believed to be infected with rabies.

The article discusses the emergence of a severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)-like infection that causes severe pneumonia. Topics include the class of virus causing the illnesses, called coronaviruses, its relation to coronaviruses carried by bats, the number of reported cases of human-to-human transmission in England and the Middle East since April 2012, and epidemiology research by Vincent Munster U.S. National Institutes of Health’s (NIH's) Virus Ecology Unit in Hamilton, Montana.

The article discusses a study by Angela Luis of Colorado State University in Fort Collins and colleagues in the February 1, 2013 issue of the journal "Proceedings of the Royal Society B" that found bats are more likely than rodents to carry viruses that can infect human beings. Topics include a comparison of the number of documented viruses in bats and rodents, the team's finding that bats had more documented viruses, and the link between overlapping mammal habitats and virus.

The article discusses Ebola virus research by Fabian Leendertz of the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin and colleagues in the January 2015 issue of the journal "EMBO Molecular Medicine" that suggests the epicenter of the 2014 Ebola epidemic in West Africa is a hollow tree in Guinea, inhabited by insect-eating free-tailed bats of a species (Mops condylurus). The bats are thought to have infected 2-year-old Emile Ouamouno, who is thought to be the first person to contract Ebola in this outbreak.

This article reports on a study of bat-carried Nipah virus in Bangladesh. Fruit bats in that country trigger outbreaks of the disease. The bats eat fruits that children then collect to sell to vendors who blend the fruit into drinks. Because of the country's largely Muslim population, the drinks are consumed before they ferment which would kill off the virus. Lack of knowledge about bats as viral reservoirs hampers research and prevention.

The article discusses studies of the Ebola virus. Researchers combing the forests of Central Africa have found evidence that fruit bats can carry the Ebola virus, a report in the Dec. 1 Nature reveals. Ebola causes an often deadly hemorrhagic fever in people, but how the virus spreads from place to place and between species has perplexed scientists since human infections were first identified in 1976 in Zaire.

Presents research which demonstrates for the first time that healthy bats may harbor the Ebola virus. Cautioning that bats may not be the sole reservoir for the virus; Why the search for an animal host has been difficult, since Ebola first emerged in Yambuku, Zaire in 1976; The work of Robert Swanepoel and his associates as reported in the October-December 1996 `Emerging Infectious Diseases,' the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's online journal.