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Published: Friday, September 28, 2012, 12:01 a.m.

Most of the bat strains do not infect people. Why the new strain does -- and how it got into two unrelated people from the same part of the world months apart -- is a mystery being urgently investigated by scientists in Europe, the Middle East and the United States.

The new bug is a coronavirus, a family that includes the agent of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), which caused more than 8,000 infections and 900 deaths in 2003. The SARS coronavirus is also carried by bats.

"It is perplexing. But it is the very early days," said Nick Phin, an epidemiologist at the British government's Health Protection Agency who is helping investigate the case of the Qatari patient, who is in an intensive care unit of a London hospital.

The goal is to determine as quickly as possible whether the new virus is a threat to public health or a one-off event that in less vigilant times might have been missed entirely. So far there is no evidence of other, unexplained cases of severe pneumonia with kidney failure, which are the hallmarks of the two cases.

"We should keep our feet on the ground. Two birds don't make a summer and two patients don't make an outbreak," said Ron A.M. Fouchier, a virologist at Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam. Fouchier determined the gene sequence of the new virus and posted it for other investigators to see and use.

With no sign that the virus is transmitted from person-to-person or is easily picked up from animals, the advice to the public "has to be go about your normal business," Phin said.

Fouchier's laboratory isolated the new coronavirus from lung tissue from a 60-year-old Saudi man who was admitted to a hospital in Jiddah on June 13 and died June 24.

The Qatari patient became ill on Sept. 3 and was hospitalized in Doha a few days later. On Sept. 11, he was sent by air ambulance to England. There, a coronavirus was isolated from lung fluid and partially sequenced.

The Qatari man had recently visited Saudi Arabia. But he returned home more than 10 days before he became ill, according to a report by the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control in Stockholm. Because the incubation period for coronavirus infections is about a week, that suggests he acquired the virus in Qatar, not Saudi Arabia.

Originally posted here:
Mystery killer virus linked to bats