It was not really from eating bats. It was from butchering bats, because a butcher is likely at some point to cut themselves and end up unwittingly inoculating themselves with the blood of animals they butcher. This produces a small chance that a virus which is adapted to live in that animal might manage to reproduce inside of the human host and, by natural selection, the strand might evolve into a virus able to inhabit the human body.
The chance is very small but of course it becomes more likely if a species is butchered in huge amounts every day.
Flue comes originally from horses butchering. So do many other viruses, such as avian flue and most likely the HIV virus.
So, it was not all that strange or suspicious of BBC to report that virologists were looking into that for a long time.
