Marc Valitutto, a wildlife vet with Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute’s Global Health Program, said: “Our goal is to look for a pandemic virus, a virus that has the potential to have high mortality."

While he does not believe that the virus they have isolated will turn into a pandemic he says that it is important to keep track of them.

"We already know about viruses that have mutated like avian influenza or swine it. It's a concern for us but right now it doesn't seem that this virus will do that. Virologists would be able to determine what level of mutation you would need for that to happen," he said.

“We still have hundreds more samples to test and we expect that we will find more novel viruses.”

The team will now look at samples from people living in the area to find out whether the virus has already made the jump to humans and what the risks are for the disease to spread.

The Predict project is a forerunner of the bigger Global Virome Project – a 10-year plan to identify all the 1.67m unknown viruses in animals, some 800,000 of which researchers think have the potential to spread to humans.