Health officials worldwide are on alert after the discovery of a new virus in two patients with pneumonia. The agent belongs to the coronavirus group, which includes several cold virus, but the virus that causes SARS, a serious disease that has killed more than 700 people in a global epidemic moving fast in 02 and 03 before be contained.
the first known patient in the new incident was a 60-year-old from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, who died of pneumonia in July; her case was reported by Ali Mohamed Zaki Soliman Fakeeh Hospital in Jeddah on ProMED, a list of e-mail on emerging infections, September 15. Yesterday, Health Protection Agency UK (HPA) reported that a man 49 years old Qatari, who had traveled to Saudi Arabia and is being treated in an intensive care unit in London, is infected with the same virus. Several other cases are reportedly under investigation; it is not known if the virus can be transmitted between humans or the size of a threat he may pose to public health.
Science Insider spoke to Ron Fouchier, a virologist at Erasmus MC in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, who have sequenced the genome of the virus and found that the Saudi and Qatari patients most likely are infected by the same virus. Questions and answers were written for brevity and clarity
Q:.? What do you think we're dealing with
RF: For now, all we know is that one patient died and another is terribly ill. Other cases are under investigation, but as far as I know they have not been confirmed. So for now, we're just assuming that there were two individual infections, probably some animal reservoir. They were 3 months apart, which is too long for one another infected. I can not speculate on that
There are now six known human coronaviruses. one of them is SARS, but four cause colds and are quite harmless. So we will keep both feet on the floor and do not blow this out of proportion
Q:.? How your laboratory will be involved in this case
RF: We participated in the discovery of several viruses, including other coronaviruses, and recently, we published an article in PLoS oNE describing a test for the whole family of paramyxoviruses. So when Dr. Zaki had cultivated an unidentifiable virus from one of his patients, he emailed me, mainly because he wanted us to test for paramyxoviruses, and then he sent us the virus. I asked him if he had tested for coronaviruses, it has not yet done. There is a test developed by [the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] which tests for all known coronaviruses. So while the virus was on its way to our laboratory, Dr. Zaki discovered it was a coronavirus. But it does not have the facilities to the sequence of the virus, so that what we have done here.
When he posted the conclusion on ProMED, there was a patient in intensive care in London, so the HPA immediately began looking for a coronavirus as well, and that is positive income . They sent us the sequence of a very small PCR [polymerase chain reaction] fragment, only 0 nucleotides, and except for one nucleotide, it was identical to our virus. Of course, you need to sequence the entire genome, but on the basis of this we can assume that we are dealing with the same virus. Meanwhile, we have sent the complete genome and the virus itself to the UK, so they can determine if it is really
Q:.? Why did you think it might be a coronavirus
RF: We always think coronavirus. ... Flu, paramyxovirus and coronavirus are the most obvious candidates when you have a serious respiratory infection
Q:.? Will you study this new virus
RF: Yes, we do. We wrote a case report with Dr. Zaki on this first case and are working on the annotation of the complete genome, we will write such a paper as well. But of course, we need to start doing animal experiments. At first, we thought it was an isolated case in Saudi Arabia; Now that the virus has resurfaced in London also, I think we need to become a little more aggressive.
First, we'll see if the animals sick of this virus. You can isolate a patient of a virus, but it does not mean that they died of it; to show that causes the disease you need to fulfill Koch's postulates. That's what we did for SARS, and it is what we hope to do here; we have applied for emergency ethical approval. The most obvious animal species to this virus are mice, ferrets, and perhaps monkeys. We must see what we can get approval for.
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