This could be the start of something big—20 years since the identification of bats as the natural host of Hendra virus

Black, Peter; Douglas, Ian; Field, Hume

The impetus for the meeting was firstly a failure of initial investigations to find evidence of the virus in a wide range of potential natural hosts-both native and introduced animals-caught in the paddock where the equine index case was at pasture. Even mosquitoes had been examined on the basis that they might serendipitously "blood sample" an elusive host that had avoided capture and testing [4] . The second motivating factor was the retrospective identification (in late 1995) of a second Hendra virus incident involving two equine cases and a human case on a property at Mackay, 800 km north of the Brisbane outbreak [8] . The human case had relapsed after an initial brief illness 14 months earlier [7] . Thus, there were now two known foci of infection with this novel virus that were spatially disparate, but temporally clustered within a few weeks of each other. Intensive epidemiological tracing failed to find linkages with horse movements or any other contact between the two case properties. Wildlife surveillance at and around the second property also failed to provide any clues.