Outbreak Specialists Track Down Recent Coronavirus
Thursday, November 29, 2012 - 09:01
in Health & Medicine
Maria Zambon was having déjà vu. Earlier this fall, she found out about a new coronavirus that had come seemingly from nowhere to kill a Saudi man in Jeddah in June and seriously sicken another. The survivor had been flown from Qatar to a London hospital. His lungs were overwhelmed with infection, his kidneys failing. Virologists at Erasmus Medical Center, in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, were already working on an isolate from the Saudi man to decode the virus's genetic sequence. They named the virus HCoV-EMC, short for human coronavirus and the institution's initials. [More]