Maryn McKenna is not just a superb science writer—she's also quite capable of covering breaking news with perspective and context. Here's her new post on Superbug: Why The New Coronavirus Unnerves Public Health: Remembering SARS. Click through for the full report and lot of good links. Excerpt:
The World Health Organization has issued an alert and written a preliminary case definition, which because it is early in this episode is so loose — involving fever, cough and either travel to Qatar or Saudi Arabia, or contact with someone who did — that it is likely to turn up many unrelated cases that could temporarily inflate the numbers.
The virus is so new that it has not been named officially, but as of last night it had been partially sequenced and aligned with other coronoviruses including the SARS virus. The dendrogram, and information about lab options for molecular diagnostics, were posted last night by the UK’s Health Protection Agency. (Soon afterward, virologist and commentator Vincent Racaniello cautioned that Koch’s postulates haven’t yet been fulfilled, underlining that the virus has been isolated from people with respiratory symptoms, but has not yet been proven to cause those symptoms.)
And the WHO’s spokesman on the emerging virus, Gregory Hartl, has repeatedly reminded media covering the story that (as he said in a briefing taped Tuesday) “this is not SARS, it will not become SARS, it is not SARS-like” — a point that was not necessarily meant to be a reassurance, since he added, “It is distinct from SARS at least in the fact that we’ve seen so far, it causes very rapid renal failure.”
