Coronavirus Mystifies Scientists Seeing SARS-Like Spread

[xchrom]

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-19/coronavirus-mystifies-scientists-seeing-sars-like-spread.html


An electron microscope image of a coronavirus, part of a family of viruses that cause ailments including the common cold and SARS, which was first identified last year in the Middle East.

Hofuf, a run-down desert oasis town in eastern Saudi Arabia, is home to some of the world’s richest oil fields. It’s also the source of a more worrisome export: a deadly coronavirus.

The city is at the epicenter of an outbreak of a previously unknown virus that has killed 38 people in the Middle East and Europe, recently prompting Margaret Chan, the World Health Organization’s director general, to call it her “greatest concern.”

Now more voices are chiming in. The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control said yesterday that a dearth of information about the outbreak from Saudi Arabia means it could evolve into a crisis similar to the SARS epidemic in China a decade ago. And researchers in the New England Journal of Medicine said in a study released yesterday that the infection is easily transmitted in hospitals, posing a “serious risk.”

“There’s ongoing transmission,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy in Minneapolis. “That’s what really poses the ongoing threat to the world.”

[marmar]

1. Scary.

[xchrom]

2. indeed. 'mystifies scientists' isn't the phrase you want to hear. nt

[GeorgeGist]

3. No. Scientists are not mystified.

Reading is fundamental.

[SheilaT]

4. While people getting sick and dying is not exactly trivial,

isn't this exactly what viruses are supposed to do? Mutate, evolve, and go on their merry way? It's not as though they are deliberately and with malice aforethought setting out to harm us.

And this is why we have things like the CDC and the World Health Organization, to notice these things and try to protect us as early as possible.