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  • CORRESPONDENCE

Don’t misrepresent link between bats and SARS

By
  1. Paul A. Racey

    1. University of Exeter, Penryn, Cornwall, UK.

  2. Brock Fenton

    1. Department of Biology, University of Western Ontario, Canada.

  3. Samira Mubareka

    1. Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathobiology, Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto, Canada.

  4. Nancy Simmons

    1. Department of Mammalogy, American Museum of Natural History, New York City, New York, USA.

  5. Merlin Tuttle

    1. Merlin Tuttle’s Bat Conservation, Austin, Texas, USA.

We find your report on bats and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) sensationalist and misleading (Nature 552, 15–16, 2017). The important work it discusses does not claim to pinpoint conclusively the source of the SARS outbreak (B. Hu et al. PLoS Pathog. 13, e1006698; 2017), as implied by your “smoking gun” metaphor. The rapid rate of evolution of RNA viruses means that SARS could have arisen in one of many areas. Thus, your inference that the strain “could easily” have originated in this bat population is, in our view, unjustified.

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Nature 553, 281 (2018)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-00603-7

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