Twelve years ago the world was threatened by an outbreak of a new coronavirus called SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome). SARS infected more than 8,000 people and killed one in ten of those infected. In 2012 and 2013, a second coronavirus emerged in Saudi Arabia and was named MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome). The MERS virus is a beta-coronavirus (MERS-CoV), which belongs to the same family as SARS but has some novel biological features. Populations of cave bats in the Arabian peninsula appear to be the MERS reservoir, and many camels in Saudi Arabia have been infected. It is presumed that the virus was transmitted from camels to humans. Human-to-human transmission is...
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