Here at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, experts from the U.S. Public Health Service and their civilian counterparts have been interacting with twice weekly since the beginning of June to track the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus. MERS-CoV, as the pathogen is known, causes fevers, severe coughs, and fast renal failure as it attacks the lungs of victims.
Since it was initially isolated in June 2012 in the city of Jeddah, MERS has contaminated at least 77 people and killed at least 40 of them. The number of confirmed situations has quadrupled since April, and patients have been sickened as far away as Tunisia and Britain. Most troubling to health experts are reports of illnesses in patients who have not gone to the center East. The pathogen has not yet emerged in the U.S., and it never will perhaps. But when the pilgrimage season begins in July, perhaps 11, 000 American Muslims will travel to the Arabian Peninsula, if past trends persist. In the meantime, large numbers more will take flight between continents, residents of today’s globalized world.
Matthew Friedman, a virologist at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore. Many of the scientists working to understand MERS are veterans of the 2003 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS. A previously unknown coronavirus – a sphere-shaped virus spiked with proteins which make it look like it offers a corona, or halo – jumped from its bat hosts and began infecting and killing people in …