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Seven new coronaviruses have been discovered in bats in Gabon, but their potential to spill over into people and cause a covid-19-like pandemic is unclear.

We have known that coronaviruses can jump from bats to people and cause serious illness since the 2002-03 SARS coronavirus outbreak was traced back to bats in China. Covid-19 is another coronavirus that is and crossed to people, possibly via other animals.

The majority of bat coronaviruses identified so far have been found in bats in Asia, but a growing number are being detected in bats in Africa.

Gael Maganga at the International Centre of Medical Research of Franceville in Gabon and his colleagues recently tested more than 1000 bats living in caves dotted around the country and found that 18 were carrying coronaviruses. Genetic sequencing showed that seven of these coronaviruses, which were all found in insect-eating bats from the Hipposideridae family, were new to science.

Five of the novel viruses were closely related to a known coronavirus called human coronavirus 229E that has been circulating in people since at least the 1960s, but usually only causes mild cold symptoms. This suggests the novel strains may also be able to infect people and cause mild colds or possibly worse, but more work is needed to investigate this, says Maganga.

The other two viruses weren鈥檛 related to any known human coronaviruses, making it difficult to tell how dangerous they might be if they were to mutate into forms that could infect people, says Maganga. 鈥淭hey could lead to the emergence of viruses potentially pathogenic to humans and able to cause an epidemic or even a pandemic,鈥� he says.

Preventing another pandemic

Now that so many new bat coronaviruses are being detected around the world, we need to work out which ones carry the most risk to people so that we can monitor and contain them before they potentially cause another pandemic, says Marc Valitutto at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in the US, who recently discovered .

For example, studying the genetic sequences of novel bat coronaviruses will reveal if they contain any codes for receptors that are known to allow access into human cells, says Valitutto.

Another priority should be to minimise contact between bats and people to prevent viral transmission, says Valitutto. 鈥淲hile this may sound like an easy task, it involves a great deal of government intervention for policy, policing and education, as well as a cultural shift away from traditional practices,鈥� he says.

In Gabon, bats have traditionally been hunted for food, but the eating and selling of bats was banned by the Gabon government on 3 April as a precaution against viral spillovers.