a virus by another name? Researchers recommended a new name for a new coronavirus ( above ) were first in the Middle East.
Rocky Mountain Laboratories, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, NIH
New MERS case. MERS coronavirus. Or, if things really go wrong-the MERS pandemic. Here's how the world could soon be talking about the new virus that surfaced in the Arabian Peninsula last summer and it was rattling from health experts. In a move that may end up more than 7 months of confusion, an international group of scientists and public health officials recommend once the new virus called Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV).
The group plans to release a document recommending the new name, said Raoul de Groot, a veterinary virologist at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, who coordinated the effort. De Groot Coronavirus chairs the Task Force of the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV), who took the initiative to find a new name widely accepted. The study group has no power to enforce the use of the name, however; it will be up to researchers deciding to adopt the nickname.
New name comes as Saudi Arabia reported 13 new cases of the virus, including seven deaths in just the last 5 days. The wave over a month after the last reported case, a 73 year-old from Abu Dhabi, who died in Munich on 26 March-fresh worries triggered the virus could begin to spread between humans and trigger a global epidemic. To date, the total number of reported cases is 30, including 18 deaths.
Confusion reigned over the new name since the virus was reported by Ali Mohamed Zaki, an Egyptian microbiologist which isolates in June 2012 of a patient in a Jeddah hospital in Saudi Arabia, where he worked at the time. Zaki sent the virus to Ron Fouchier virology group at Erasmus MC in Rotterdam, Netherlands, which characterized further in an article published in m Bio in November. Alexander Gorbalenya a coronavirologist at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands and Vice President of ICTV, was co-author and the group tentatively called HCoV virus-EMC / 2012, short for human coronavirus-Erasmus MC.
The reference to the Dutch laboratory did not sit well with the health authorities in Saudi Arabia, who said Zaki lacked permission to send the virus to Rotterdam first. However, most researchers agreed HCoV-EMC as the name to use. Some have dropped the "EMC", however, and called the virus simply HCoV, a name that could be confusing because there are five other human coronaviruses. The World Health Organization (WHO) adopted the more neutral "novel coronavirus" as originally -abbreviated Ncov but more recently as Ncov-a name which, by its nature, was not made to last.
pathogens Naming is a sensitive issue. Historically, many-or agents of infectious diseases the diseases themselves-are named after the place where they were found. But increasingly, scientists and officials of public health have been reluctant to this system to avoid stigmatizing a particular country or city. When a new type of severe pneumonia began spreading in Asia in 03, the WHO officials have coined the term acute severe respiratory syndrome (SARS) to prevent the disease from being named "Chinese flu" or something similar . (As it happened, the name ruffled feathers in Hong Kong anyway, because the official name of the city is Hong Kong, the region-a fact that WHO Special Administrative had neglected.)
for similar reasons, researchers agree that naming the new virus, a distant cousin of SARS after Jeddah and Saudi Arabia would not be wise; Fouchier said it why he named it after his laboratory instead. MERS refers to a much larger area and does not distinguish one country, De Groot said, "I do not think it needs to be stigmatizing" infections with the new virus have so far been found in. residents of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates. It was also a group of three patients in the UK, the first who is suspected of having contracted the virus while traveling in Saudi Arabia.
de Groot said the group spent a lot of effort to find a name that all parties could agree. a representative of the Saudi Ministry of Health will be one of the signatories of the declaration , WHO has been consulted and agreed with the new name as well, he said
. (a WHO spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment today.)the new name is only a recommendation and that the hopes of the study group will be widely adopted, but it has no power to enforce, Gorbalenya said. Indeed, ICTV has the sole authority to classify and name the whole virus species. MERS-CoV does not appear to be a species by itself, said Gorbalenya; the researchers found genetic evidence of bat coronaviruses that are likely to be in the same species. (Similarly, a species called human betacoronavirus 1 contains both OC43, a human cold virus, bovine coronavirus.) The coronavirus study group will then propose a name for the species, which may be different from MERS -CoV.
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