The same animal responsible for spreading the Ebola virus may hold the cure as well, scientists in the U.K. say.

Bats can carry more than 100 viruses, including Ebola, rabies and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), and how they are able to do so without being affected may be the key to the cure, researchers at the University of Cambridge told Reuters.

After a gene analysis, the scientists were able to determine that the bats' ability to fly is the reason why they are immune to the effects of the viruses.

Since flying requires their metabolism to run at a high rate, which causes stress and potential cell damage, the bats may have developed a defense mechanism to help cope: having parts of their immune system permanently switched on, Reuters reported.

"If we can understand how they do it then that could lead to better ways to treat infections that are highly lethal in people and other mammals," Olivier Restif, a researcher at the University of Cambridge in Britain, told Reuters.

Since 1976, when the Ebola virus first spread in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, bats have been suspected of being a carrier and reason for its spread in African countries.

The bats are hunted as bushmeat, a food item for West and Central Africans, and preparation of the meat involves the preparer to come in contact with the blood of the bat.

Ebola can spread by contact with bodily fluids such as blood, saliva, sweat, etc.

This is a reason why West Africans -- from Liberia, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Guinea -- were quarantined in their homes and told not to seek out one of the most populous food sources. Bats and rodents are some of the most populous animals in the world.

Michelle Baker of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, Australia's national science agency, published a paper with her colleagues that studied a possible link between flying and a better immune system.

"(This) raises the interesting possibility that flight-induced adaptations have had inadvertent effects on bat immune function and possibly also life expectancy," the paper said, according to Reuters.