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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