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MONTREAL - Wildlife scientists are scouring deserted mines in southern Quebec for traces of a deadly disease decimating bat populations in the U.S. northeast.

Thousands of cases of an illness American wildlife officials call white-nose syndrome have popped up in grottoes and abandoned mines in a half-dozen U.S. states.

White-nose syndrome often leaves behind skinny, dehydrated corpses that appear to have had their snouts dunked in a bucket of flour.

As U.S. wildlife specialists scramble to determine how many bats are infected with the previously unknown disease, Quebec biologists fear it might have crept north of the border.

"If we have this (disease) it could really threaten populations because there are huge mortality rates in the United States," said Jacques Jutras, a biologist with Quebec's Wildlife Department.

"They're dying by the tens of thousands."

U.S. officials estimate a 50- to 90-per-cent mortality rate among bats with the syndrome. They don't know if humans can contract the disease.

"This, I hope I can say, is a once-in-a-lifetime event," said Susi von Oettingen, an endangered species specialist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

"We've never seen anything like this before with our bats, much less any other mammals, with a very large regional die-off."

Quebec wildlife scientists recently looked over hibernating bats in two abandoned mines on the outskirts of Bolton, Que., near the Vermont border.

Preliminary results revealed no signs of the disease, but the department plans to study dead specimens that were collected.

Two other mines are scheduled for inspection next week, with one quest requiring biologists to strap on snowshoes and trudge through seven kilometres of deep drifts to the entrance of one of the caverns, said Robert Patenaude of Quebec's Wildlife Department.

"It's the first time something like this has ever happened, and this really has taken everybody by surprise because it's not just one cave, it's been seen in a lot of different sites," Patenaude said of the U.S. discoveries.

The disease was first documented in New York in the winter of 2006-07, but U.S. wildlife officials only realized the depth of its impact with a series of checks on hibernation caves that began earlier this winter.

Scientists have since found the disease in Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut.

Last year, between 8,000 and 11,000 bats - more than half the local wintering population - died of the illness in the Albany, N.Y., area, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.