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The Associated Press Published Thursday, Sep. 27, 2012 6:53AM EDT

LONDON -- Global health officials have alerted doctors to be on the lookout for new cases of a virus related to SARS but said there was no sign the disease was behaving like the killer respiratory syndrome that killed hundreds in 2003.

Earlier this week, the World Health Organization announced the new coronavirus had been found in a critically ill Qatari man being treated in London as well as in a Saudi Arabian man who died several months earlier. Genetic sequencing found the viruses in the two men to be nearly identical.

Gregory Hartl, a WHO spokesman, said Thursday the two might have been infected directly by animals and there was no indication of human to human spread.

The new coronavirus is from a family of viruses that cause the common cold as well as SARS, the severe acute respiratory syndrome that killed about 800 people, mostly in Asia in a 2003 epidemic. SARS jumped to people from civet cats and then mutated into a form easily spread among humans.

Unlike SARS, the new virus also causes rapid kidney failure, a complication not usually seen in respiratory viruses. In London, the Qatari patient is in critical but stable condition and is being treated with an artificial lung machine.

Hartl said WHO is monitoring reports of suspect cases of the new virus but none have so far been confirmed. Britain's Health Protection Agency said a small number of potential cases were being evaluated. On Wednesday, Danish authorities ruled out a handful of cases in people who had recently been in Saudi Arabia and Qatar hospitalized with flu-like symptoms.

WHO also issued a case definition for the new virus to help doctors spot cases early. The agency advised them to investigate any patients hospitalized with acute respiratory syndrome not explained by other causes who had close contact with probable or confirmed cases or had recently travelled to Saudi Arabia or Qatar.

Saudi officials said they were concerned that the next month's annual Muslim pilgrimage of Hajj could provide more opportunities for the virus to spread. They advised pilgrims to keep their hands clean and wear masks in crowded places.

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WHO advises doctors worldwide to be on alert for new virus

Sept. 27, 2012, midnight

DOG owners have been warned to act responsibly or face the consequences.

Mount Isa Mayor Tony McGrady issued the warning in response to an increase in Canine Parvovirus cases in the city.

Cr Tony McGrady said council would review Mount Isa's dog policy.

"We are looking at the whole of the dog policy, because quite honestly there are genuine dog owners who love their animals and do the right thing such as registering their dogs and having a fence high enough so their dogs can't jump," he said.

"But we have the other people who are making life unbearable in the neighbourhood, simply because they don't care and they think they can just have as many dogs as they like, and they can't."

Cr McGrady said 27 dogs were picked up in a blitz a few weeks ago, an initiative that would continue.

"We are looking at getting council workers out on Saturdays," he said.

"The message we want to send out is that if people think the council work from Monday to Friday, 8 to 4, we have news for them."

He said during the blitz, none of the 27 dogs picked up had shown symptoms of parvovirus, but since then, two of the stray dogs had displayed symptoms.

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Killer dog virus on the rise as Isa mayor cracks down

Doctors may soon have a new zit zapper, thanks to the discovery that a harmless virus living on human skin seeks out and kills pimple-causing bacteria.

A paper on this pimple enemy is in the latest issue of the American Society for Microbiology's mBio.

"Acne affects millions of people, yet we have few treatments that are both safe and effective," co-author Robert Modlin was quoted as saying in a press release. "Harnessing a virus that naturally preys on the bacteria that causes pimples could offer a promising new tool against the physical and emotional scars of severe acne."

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Modlin is chief of dermatology and professor of microbiology, immunology and molecular genetics at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. He and his colleagues investigated two microbes: Propionibacterium acnes, a bacterium thriving in our pores that can trigger acne; and P. acnes phages, a family of viruses that live on human skin. They seem to hate zits but nothing else, rendering them harmless to people.

P. acnes is the bane of many teenagers and other acne victims. When this bacteria aggravates the immune system, it causes the swollen, red bumps associated with acne.

"We know that sex hormones, facial oil and the immune system play a role in causing acne, however, a lot of research implicates P. acnes as an important trigger," explained co-author Laura Marinelli, a UCLA postdoctoral researcher in Modlin's laboratory. "Sometimes they set off an inflammatory response that contributes to the development of acne."

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For the study, she and her colleagues lifted acne bacteria and the P. acnes viruses from the noses of both pimply and clear-skinned volunteers. After studying the material, they discovered that the small size, limited diversity and killing capabilities of the viruses make them good candidates for a new anti-acne therapy.

"Our findings provide valuable insights into acne and the bacterium that causes it," co-author Graham Hatfull said. "The lack of genetic diversity among the phages (a virus parasitic in bacteria) that attack the acne bacterium implies that viral-based strategies may help control this distressing skin disorder."

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Excellent Idea of the Day: Viral Pimple Killer

Threatwatch is your early warning system for global dangers, from nuclear peril to deadly viral outbreaks. Debora MacKenzie highlights the threats to civilisation and suggests solutions

It's one of those stories where bemused interviewers ask, how worried should we be? Two people from the Arabian peninsula picked up a virus no one has ever seen before; one is now very ill, the other has died. The virus belongs to the same family as SARS, another virus no one had seen before when it emerged from China in 2002.

SARS circled the globe and killed almost 800 people, and those are just the ones we know of. Were it not for a landmark global effort in disease control and a fair amount of luck it would probably still be out there. Is the still-nameless Middle Eastern virus the next SARS?

No it isn't yet. But this column is about watching for threats, so we can protect ourselves. And this story is exactly that. We know about this virus solely because of a European Union project set up in response to SARS. It funds scientists to monitor unusual infections and spot the next SARS, or whatever, before it's crawling through city tower blocks and international airports.

"If we had known about SARS when it had only infected a few people, we might have stopped it then," says Ab Osterhaus of Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, who helped set up the system.

A 60-year-old Saudi man died in July of pneumonia plus kidney failure. Doctors there sent samples to Ron Fouchier at Erasmus, who caused a storm last year with work that made H5N1 bird flu virus transmissible among mammals.

A man from Qatar with the same symptoms was flown to London for intensive care in September. Rotterdam asked for a sample. Preliminary sequencing suggests both men were infected by the same new virus, says Osterhaus.

The technology now available for sequencing whole viruses within days means new human respiratory viruses are being discovered at the rate of about one per year, says John Oxford of Queen Mary College in London. But sequencing is too expensive to routinely screen every unexplained illness without help.

"It's like stamp collecting," says Osterhaus. "You don't know when something is going to turn out to be interesting," so ordinary research funding doesn't cover it. Neither the Saudi nor the Qatar sample would have been sequenced, he says, without the European Union's EMPERIE programme, set up after SARS to watch for novel viruses with the aim of catching the next epidemic before it gets out of control.

"It gives us a whole virus discovery machine," says Osterhaus, from screening bats, to sequencing samples from humans, to alerting medics to watch for odd cases. Now they know this family of coronaviruses can kill people, they also know to handle it at safer levels of containment.

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Threatwatch: New killer virus in the Middle East

It is called Novel Coronavirus, it is deadly and it is a nightmare: it seems the virus that causes the common cold has mutated to a pathogenic strain which causes severe respiratory problems and kidney failure. It has been confirmed that this type of virus has never been found before in humans. The epicenter seems to be Saudi Arabia; to date there is one death and one person in the ICU.

The human toll so far is one man dead in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (a 60-year-old Saudi national) and one Qatari national with a history of travel to Saudi Arabia seriously ill in an Intensive Care Unit in a London hospital, where he is in isolation with serious respiratory problems and kidney failure.

The patient is a previously healthy 49-year-old male, a Qatari national, whose symptoms began on September 3. Before the symptoms appeared, he had traveled to Saudi Arabia (Riyadh) and by September 7 he was in an ICU in Doha, Qatar. He was transferred to London on September 11.

Laboratory tests carried out by the Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands has confirmed that the virus isolate present in the latter case indicates a 99.5% similarity with the identity of the isolate obtained from the fatal case earlier this year. There is a mismatch of one nucleotide.

According to the World Health Organization, "Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses which includes viruses that cause the common cold and SARS. Given that this is a novel coronavirus, WHO is currently in the process of obtaining further information to determine the public health implications of these two confirmed cases". These cases, however, are not SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Symdrome, which broke out in the Far East in 2002-2003, causing nearly one thousand fatalities worldwide and was linked to civets).

The WHO (as usual) does not recommend travel restrictions.

Several questions are raised here:

1. Does the mismatch in the nucleotide mean that the virus is evolving?

2. Are we about to see a deadly remake of the Swine Flu Pandemic (A H1N1) of 2009, when the authorities which are supposed to protect us stood back and limited themselves to informing the world's population as to how the virus was progressing?

3. Does swift and decisive action by the authorities mean that the pharma industry loses out on billions in revenue from research and development and commercialization of medicines?

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Killer new mystery virus