Some of the deadliest diseases to infect humans have come from pathogens that jumped from animals to people.

The virus that causes AIDS, for example, came from chimpanzees.

And many experts believe the virus that caused the COVID-19 pandemic came from bats.

But, as a new study shows, this disease exchange has not been just from animals to humans.

In fact, research of all the publicly available viral genome sequences produced a surprising result: humans give about two times as many viruses to animals than they give to us.

The researchers looked at nearly 12 million virus genomes and found almost 3,000 times a virus jumped from one species to another.

Of those, 79 percent involved a virus going from one animal species to another animal species.

The remaining 21 percent involved humans.

Of those, 64 percent were human-to-animal transmissions.

Thirty-six percent were animal-to-human transmissions.