science.org SCIENCEBut when a supervisor hired an outside
company to solve an assay problem that
she knew how to fix herself, she decided
her tech days had ended. “I thought, ‘I can
do more than that.’”
In graduate school, she studied with
Thiravat, who treated people infected with
rabies, mainly through dog bites. A re-
lated virus that infects Australian bats also
causes a rabieslike disease in humans, so
she and Thiravat decided in 2002 to start
sampling bats in Thailand. The bats car-
ried antibodies to that second virus, indi-
cating its presence in Thailand as well. At
the government’s behest, the researchers
also began sampling bats and other ani-
mals for Nipah virus, which
emerged in Malaysian pigs
and their farmers in 1998,
killing up to 75% of in-
fected humans.
Supaporn, Thiravat, and
colleagues repeatedly found
antibodies to Nipah in
Pteropus, or flying foxes,
the world’s largest bats
with a 1.5-meter wingspan.
Eventually, the team iso-
lated the virus itself from a
bat. To dispel folklore about
a popular aphrodisiac in
Thailand and other Asian
countries, they published
a paper in Clinical Infec-
tious Diseases in 2006 with
a startling title: “Drinking
Bat Blood May Be Hazard-
ous to Your Health.”
To prevent Nipah spill-
overs, for 2 decades Supaporn
has tested humans and pigs in vil-
lages near Wat Luang Phrommawat, a
400-year-old temple with a grove of trees
where some 10,000 flying foxes roost.
She has never found Nipah virus or its
immunological footprints in humans or
pigs, but Supaporn says the work led the
locals to discard fruit that was partially
eaten, possibly by the bats.
“I have a responsibility to the community
to do education about this risk,” she says.
The Nipah studies caught the attention
of scientists at the EcoHealth Alliance, a
conservation-oriented nonprofit in New
York City that was part of PREDICT, and
in 2009 it subcontracted with Supaporn todo wildlife surveillance in Thailand. Peter
Daszak, who heads EcoHealth, notes that
few researchers in the countries where
pandemics tend to originate do such work.
“Supaporn’s one of those who gets it,”
says Daszak, who has been scrutinized
because of the possibility—dismissed by
many scientists as pure speculation—that
SARS-CoV-2 leaked from a lab EcoHealth
collaborated with at the Wuhan Institute
of Virology in China. “And it’s not easy for
someone to develop their own pathway
like she has.”
Since then, Supaporn has done mul-
tiple studies with EcoHealth and PRE-
DICT. She showed that bat guano used as
fertilizer by Thai farmers
was contaminated with a
coronavirus related to the
cause of MERS, and she
ranked the spillover po-
tential of different animal
v i r u s e s. E v e n b e f o r e t h e p a n -
demic, she had described
63 coronavirus sequences
detected in 13 species of
Thai bats she sampled.
Shi Zhengli, who runs
the Wuhan lab and also has
come under attack by lab-
leak proponents, has col-
laborated with Supaporn
and says they often swap
ideas. “Tropical Asia is a
hot spot of wildlife-borne
emerging infectious dis-
eases,” Shi says, “so her job
is very important for dis-
ease prevention and pre-
caution in the region.” PHOTOS: LAUREN DECICCASnared with butterfly nets and moved to cloth bags, Rhinolophus bats are named for their distinctive horseshoe-shaped noses (right).
A water pipe at a wildlife sanctuary held a colony of Rhinolophus bats. Some sampled in June
2020 harbored a SARS-CoV-2 relative.236 15 APRIL 2022 • VOL 376 ISSUE 6590