Fruit bats as a natural reservoir of zoonotic viruses

As a natural reservoir of manifold zoonotic viruses, fruit bats have been involved in at least three emerging zoonoses in recent years. This paper aims to intro-duce the epidemiological characteristics of these diseases emerged in the Australasian region between 1994 and 1999, transmission pathways of the newly discovered viruses and the relationship between the changed entironment of fruit bats and occurrences of these emerging diseases and provide a clue for the epidemiological investigations of SARS.