Bats keep showing up in conversations about new diseases. But does that mean every bat is a looming epidemic risk? A new peer-reviewed analysis suggests the danger is uneven, clustering in a few branches of the bat family tree and in places where people and wildlife are being pushed into closer contact.
The researchers did not name one “next epidemic bat,” and they did not warn of an immediate threat. Instead, they built a way to rank which mammals have been linked to viruses that are both dangerous and capable of spreading widely in humans.
That kind of map can help public health teams focus limited time and money where it counts.
What “viral epidemic potential” actually means
The study centers on a simple idea with a long name, “viral epidemic potential.” In plain terms, it is a score meant to capture how bad a virus could be for people if it jumps from animals to humans and then keeps spreading.
To build that score, the researchers combined three ingredients that matter in the real world. They looked at how severe disease tends to be, how easily a virus can spread from person to person, and how many deaths have been linked to similar viruses in the past.
It is a reminder that “can infect humans” is not the same thing as “can drive a major outbreak.”
How scientists searched for patterns in the bat family tree
To hunt for patterns, the team gathered published links between mammals and viruses, then placed them onto an evolutionary “family tree” that shows how species are related. Using a computer method that scans the tree for branches with unusually high or low scores, they tested whether bats as a whole stand out or whether only certain lineages do.
They also tried to correct for a basic problem in wildlife science, which is that some animals are studied far more than others.
A key ingredient was the Global Virome in One Network database, an open catalog that pulls together many scattered records of which viruses have been detected in which vertebrates.
Having a shared, cleaned-up dataset makes it easier to compare species fairly, rather than relying on a handful of famous animals that get most of the attention.
The bat groups that stood out
In the final results, published October 30, 2025, bats did not look uniformly risky, even though they can host many viruses. The higher scores clustered in specific bat families, including horseshoe bats and several widespread insect-eating groups such as Vespertilionidae, Molossidae, and Emballonuridae.
The study also flagged geographic hotspots where those bat groups overlap with heavy human footprint, including parts of Central America, coastal South America, equatorial Africa, and Southeast Asia.
This is where headlines can get slippery. A “high potential” signal is not a prediction that an outbreak will start tomorrow, and it is not proof that a given bat species will spill a virus into humans.
It is closer to a weather map that highlights conditions where problems are more likely if the right ingredients line up.
Where human activity can tip the balance
The map matters because spillover, which is when a pathogen moves from animals into people, is often driven by contact. More roads, farms, and housing can bring bats closer to barns, fruit trees, and buildings, even if no one is looking for trouble.
Research on spillover has also stressed that there are many steps between a virus in wildlife and a human outbreak. A widely cited 2017 paper in Nature Reviews Microbiology laid out those barriers and argued that land use and ecology can shape them at multiple points, from exposure to transmission.
A warning against panic and bat persecution
Caroline A. Cummings, a doctoral student in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Oklahoma, put the stakes in everyday terms. “If we lost bats, agricultural production would be negatively affected, and so would economies,” she said.
The same message applies to public health. The goal is not to label bats as villains, but to reduce the kinds of human-bat interactions that can happen when habitats are disrupted or roosts are disturbed. Small choices add up, and the science suggests that protecting stable habitats can be part of prevention.
What smarter monitoring could look like
In public health, resources are never unlimited. Targeted surveillance is basically triage, watching the most relevant bat groups in the most pressured regions, instead of trying to sample every species everywhere. It is a bit like placing smoke alarms where fires are most likely, rather than stapling one to every wall in the house.
This also fits with earlier research that pushed back on the idea that whole animal groups are uniquely “to blame.” A 2020 paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences argued that, across big categories of mammals and birds, the share of viruses that infect humans varies less than many people assume, and that differences in research effort can distort the picture.
The main study has been published in Communications Biology.