/ Maggie Koerth-Baker / 3:42 pm Thu Dec 9, 2010

White nose syndrome has a higher mortality rate than ebola

I knew that white nose syndrome—the fungal infection that's killed more than a million bats in North America—was virulent. But I hadn't quite grasped how deadly it was until I read Brandon Keim's Wired.com story about the researchers struggling to do something, anything about this disease. Apparently, in caves infected by the fungus, between 80 and 99.9 percent of the bats have died. Researchers interviewed by Keim describe walking over carpets of bat skeletons in some caves. And there's no good way to treat sick bats, or immunize healthy ones. It's a downer. But a fascinating downer.