But it is also possible that an animal picked it up that way and then infected a human. Pigs, for instance, can get Nipah virus from bats and then pass it to humans in slaughterhouses. 
 
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 Further tests on camels, sheep, goats and a cow will be finished soon, said Dr. W. Ian Lipkin, head of Columbia University’s Center for Infection and Immunity, which has already done 15,000 polymerase chain reaction tests tracking the virus. 
 
 “It’s a huge amount of work,” he said. 
 
 It has been known for several months that bats in Africa and Eastern Europe carried viruses related to MERS, but the relevant virus had not been found in Middle Eastern bats before. Camels in Oman have shown antibodies to a similar virus. 
 
 Knowing that one bat had an identical virus is a start, but more testing will be needed, said Dr. Ziad A. Memish, the Saudi deputy health minister who was a co-author on the study and gave a presentation on the virus in Washington on Wednesday. 
 
 The infected bat was in an abandoned house in a date palm orchard in Bisha, a small Saudi Arabian city. Investigators from Columbia and EcoHealth Alliance took samples there because the first known victim of the MERS outbreak was a businessman who had lived in Bisha and had his business, a large paint warehouse, nearby. The warehouse had a large garden with fruit trees and insects that attract many kinds of bats. The victim, a wealthy 60-year-old man, got sick in mid-June and died two weeks later, Dr. Lipkin said. 
 
 The victim also owned four pet camels that were sampled, but those results are not in yet, Dr. Lipkin added. Samples taken from livestock in countries with endemic foot-and-mouth disease must first be delivered to a government laboratory on Plum Island, N.Y., to be certified negative for foot-and-mouth before they can be released for further testing. 
 
 Those restrictions can add months to the testing process, Dr. Memish said. That is one reason the bat samples were tested sooner, although other problems emerged: one of two frozen shipments of bat samples – the one the positive bat was in – was opened at Customs on entry into the United States and had thawed out by the time it reached Dr. Lipkin’s lab 48 hours later. 
 
 What was recovered from that sample, however, was a 100 percent match, which is virtually unheard of in virology, the study said. 
 
 The victim from Bisha had separate houses for his three wives and was building a fourth for a woman he planned to marry, “which suggests he was still vigorous,” Dr. Lipkin said. 
 
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 But most of those killed by the new virus were old and had chronic conditions like diabetes or heart disease. Cases are being found of younger, healthier victims who often have milder symptoms, according to Dr. Memish, so it may soon be established that the disease’s mortality rate is much lower than 60 percent. 
 
 In his presentation Wednesday, hosted in Washington by the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center’s Center for Health Security, Dr. Memish said he only learned of the existence of the new virus in his own country when he read about it late last September on ProMED, an outbreak-alert service. 
 
 Dr. Memish said that by then, it was too late to advise travelers not to come to the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, which draws 4.5 million pilgrims. “That put an incredible strain on our system,” he said. 
 
 His department ordered all Saudi hospitals to look for and report unusual cases of pneumonia. The virus does not spread easily from person to person, but there have been case clusters in which family members or nurses and doctors who cared for patients were infected. 
 
 This year, the kingdom has suggested that older people, very young children and those in ill health or with suppressed immune systems not make the pilgrimage. 

 The virus that causes Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) has been found in bats in Saudi Arabia, suggesting a potential origin for the disease, according to a new study. 
 
 Researchers tested samples from bats living about 7 miles away from the home of the first person known to be infected with MERS in Saudi Arabia. 
 
 A virus found in one of the bats was 100 percent identical to the MERS virus seen in people, the researchers said. 
 
 "There have been several reports of finding MERS-like viruses in animals. None were a genetic match. In this case, we have a virus in an animal that is identical in sequence to the virus found in the first human case. Importantly, it’s coming from the vicinity of that first case," study researcher Dr. W. Ian Lipkin, director of the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, said in a statement. 
 
 MERS first appeared in Saudi Arabia in September 2012, and has since infected 94 people and caused 46 deaths, according to the World Health Organization. 
 
 The researchers noted that bats are known to be reservoirs of other viruses that can infect people, including rabies and SARS, the severe respiratory illness that sickened more than 8,000 and killed nearly 800 in Southeast Asia in 2002 and 2003. [Why MERS Is Not the New SARS] 
 
 Because people often don't come in contact with bats, the researchers suspect that bats may infect other animals, which in turn, infect people. The researchers said they will continue to look for the virus in other domestic and wild animals in the region. 
 
 A study published earlier this month found that camels in Oman, a country in the Arabian peninsula, had developed antibodies against the MERS virus. This suggests that the camels were infected in the past with the MERS virus, or a very similar one, the researchers said. However, the actual virus was not found in the animals. 
 
 The new study is published today (Aug. 21) in journal Emerging Infectious Diseases. 
 
 Follow Rachael Rettner @RachaelRettner. FollowLiveScience @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.
– Researchers scrambling to find the source of the deadly MERS virus have pinpointed an animal culprit—but they're still not sure how it has been passed to humans. An exact match for the virus that has sickened 96 people in the Middle East, killing almost half of them, was found in a fecal pellet from an Egyptian tomb bat near the home of one of the first known victims in Saudi Arabia, the New York Times reports. This is the first time the virus has been found in an animal, but since bats—especially this species, which roosts in abandoned buildings—rarely come into contact with people, researchers believe it may infect other animals, LiveScience notes. Camels are also suspected to be a source of infection, but samples from the Saudi victim's four pet camels haven't been analyzed in the US lab that tested the bat pellet yet because an Agriculture Department laboratory has to declare them free of foot-and-mouth disease first.