Biosecurity

These scientists are racing to prevent the next Ebola

A black, cloud-like mass billows from a cave on a mountainside in Tao Pun, Thailand. The dark shape rises skyward, shifts, and pivots as the sun sets behind the golden spires of a nearby Buddhist monastery and the green rice fields of western Thailand.

It's not smoke emerging from the cave, but Thailand's largest bat colony, embarking on its nightly search for a tasty meal of insects. And just below the mouth of the cave is a team of Thai scientists, waiting to catch some of the bats as they depart.

But the scientists are less interested in the bats themselves than in the viruses they might be carrying.

They're especially on the lookout for zoonotic diseases — ones that jump from animals to humans. Over the last 60 years, this type of pathogen accounted for more than 70 percent of emerging infectious diseases globally. Ebola, which many believe humans first contracted through contact with fruit bats or primates, has killed thousands. The human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, a disease that originated in primates, has killed an estimated 34 million people.