Bats have been hosting flu virus for many years, according to a new research findings published on Monday by scientists working for the U.S.-based Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

It was an accidental discovery, according to Dr Ruben Donis, co-author of the study that came out this week on the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

According to the Associated Press (AP), Mr Donis and his team were conducting deeper probe on rabies and other specimens, involving some 300 bats in Guatemala, when his co-researchers found what they alleged as a new virus.

The virus was zeroed in on the intestines of yellow-shouldered bates, Mr Donis said, which he believed were endemic in the region.

Mr Donis added that the infected bats were known to shun humans and no attacks or bites were recorded to have originated from the flying mammal so the prospect of directly transferring the flu virus to a specific person is almost nil.

He allowed, however, that humans can get infected once they get connected with likely carriers of the bat flu, like touching a leftover fruit that was not fully consumed by the animal.

Bats mostly feast on fruits and insects, the CDC scientist noted, or at least those that his team were able to observe from 2009 to 2010,said Mr Donis, who also heads CDC's Molecular Virology and Vaccines Branch.

The CDC study also showed that the flu virus was not inducing sickness on bats, with the CSIRO suggesting that what Mr Donis and his team had discovered could be highly similar to the Hendra virus that was first detected on Queensland horses in 1994.

The virus, AP said, merely resides on bats and appeared not to cause sickness or death.

While the specific harms that the virus could cause to human population remain a mystery, scientists fear that through the natural process of mutation, the new bat virus could eventually endanger humans, the same way that avian and other flu strains have killed in the previous years and centuries.

Yet the CDC has not provided any indication that the new virus discovery could lead to some form of a plague that could decimate a large portion of earth's humanity.

So far, efforts to grow the virus within the laboratory environment have failed thus giving scientists little clues on what ways the strain could mutate or how it will be successfully transported from one carrier to another, AP wrote.

One avian flu virus expert is questioning the validity of the CDC findings and asked: "If you can't grow the virus, how do you know that the virus is there?"

Richard Fulton of the Michigan State University suggested instead that Mr Donis and his team may have stumbled on what he called as "genetic material of a flu virus."

In order to validate the CDC study, Mr Fulton told AP that researchers need to prove at least that the virus is capable of infecting other bats too, which Mr Donis said is a work now underway.