Via Nature News & Comment, a report by Declan Butler: SARS veterans tackle coronavirus. Excerpt:
Scientists who helped to fight the 2003 epidemic of SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) have sprung into action again to investigate the latest threat: a new SARS-related virus that has killed one man and left another seriously ill.
Last week, the researchers reported the genome sequence of the new coronavirus and the first diagnostic tests to screen for it — two major advances that will help in efforts to control the pathogen if it turns into a wider menace.
The SARS virus was identified in March 2003 as the cause of an epidemic that had emerged in China several months before, and which had spread rapidly around the world. It caused nearly 8,500 cases and 916 deaths before it was finally contained in July 2003. At the time, scientists knew almost nothing about the virus — coronaviruses had received scant attention until then because they had previously caused little more than colds.
The research and public-health networks established during the SARS epidemic — and the body of coronavirus research that followed — puts scientists today in a much stronger position to understand the latest virus and to develop countermeasures such as drugs and vaccines, should they be required.
“We are all collaborating again,” says Christian Drosten, director of the Institute of Virology at the University of Bonn Medical Centre in Germany, who has been involved in developing diagnostic tests for the pathogen. “This is the old SARS club.”
So far, there is little evidence that the virus poses any major public-health threat. No one who came into contact with the two cases has fallen ill, suggesting that the virus does not spread easily between humans.
Nonetheless, health authorities worldwide are not being complacent — respiratory viruses can cause pandemics, and this strain has already caused serious disease.
The key question now, and one that the diagnostics will help to answer, is whether the two cases are isolated events or whether the virus could strike again and perhaps adapt to spread more easily in humans.
