Trail infection. scientists found the MERS virus in camels from Sudan and Ethiopia, suggesting that the virus is more widespread than previously thought.
Bernard Gagnon / Wikimedia Commons
It is called the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, or MERS, after the region where almost all patients have been reported. But the name can prove to be a misnomer. A new study has found the virus in camels from Sudan and Ethiopia, suggesting that Africa, too, hosting the pathogen. This means more MERS can sicken humans than previously thought and perhaps already the most likely to trigger a pandemic.
MERS has sickened 183 people and killed 80, most of them in Saudi Arabia. If a couple have occurred in countries outside the region, such as France and the UK, but these clusters all started with a patient who had traveled to the Middle East before becoming ill.
Scientists have found more evidence implicating camels in the spread of the disease. They found that a large percentage of camels in the Middle East have antibodies against MERS in their blood, while other animals, such as goats and sheep, do not. The researchers also isolated RNA from MERS virus camel nose levies in Qatar, and earlier this week, they showed that the virus was circulating in the camels to Saudi Arabia for at least 2 decades.
Malik Peiris, a researcher in infectious diseases at Hong Kong University, and colleagues have expanded the research in Africa. In an article published last year, they showed that camels in Egypt made antibodies against MERS. For the new study, they took samples from four slaughterhouses around Egypt; Again they found antibodies against MERS in the blood of 48 of 52 camels they were tested. But the most interesting results came from making 110 camels nose samples. They found MERS RNA in four animals that had been shipped from Sudan and Ethiopia
Peiris warns that it is unclear whether the camels infected picked up the virus in Sudan and Ethiopia or their last trip in Egypt. Slaughterhouses could help MERS spread as live poultry markets are for influenza, he said. "You can not point the finger on exactly where these viruses came," he said. "But I would be very surprised if you can not find the virus in large parts of Africa."
If so, it changes the picture considerably MERS. No human cases of MERS were reported from Egypt or elsewhere in Africa, but if camels are infected, they may very well happen, said Marion Koopmans, a researcher of infectious diseases at Erasmus MC in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. "It would be important to examine systematically in this," she wrote in an email. "The health authorities really need to test patients with severe pneumonia throughout Africa for MERS," Peiris said.
the researchers were able to sequence the virus of one of the camels almost completely, and it is more than 99% identical to viruses found in people. "I would be very surprised if this virus can not infect humans," said Christian Drosten, a virologist at the University of Bonn in Germany. But the virus also shows some interesting differences from samples of known camels, he said. "We have to analyze carefully in the coming days, but it seems that this sequence expands the viral directory found in camel," he said. If the virus found in camels show more genetic variation than those isolated from man, who is a strong new evidence that camels infect humans, not the reverse.
Anthony Mounts, the point person for MERS at the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, said it is very likely that human MERS cases occur in Africa. "Wherever we find [infected] camels, there is a good chance that we will find [human] case if one looks closely," he said. And humans can be exposed to camels in Africa much more often as in the Middle East: There were about 260,000 camels in Saudi Arabia in 2012, but nearly one million in Ethiopia and 4.8 million in Sudan, according to the UN Food and agriculture the UN. human cases are, the more the risk that the virus will one day learn to become easily transmissible among people, which could trigger a pandemic.
the researchers also looked at the blood of 179 people working in slaughterhouses camels for antibodies against the MERS virus, but found none. This shows that the virus is rarely able to infect humans, Peiris said. "what we now know is the result of these rare transmissions."
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