Investigating treatment strategies for MERS-CoV

摘要

On 13 June 2012, a palienl presented at Dr Soliman Fakeeh Hospital in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, with what seemed like pneumonia and renal failure. The patient died 11 days later. Virologist Ali Mohamed Zaki, who worked in the hospital's diagnostic laboratory, suspected that sputum samples obtained from the patient contained a virus. But it was not until several months later, with a spate of patients across the Middle East reporting similar respiratory symptoms, that he confirmed his hunch. The ill ness was caused by a novel coronavirus, dubbed Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV). Coronaviruses arc a species that often infect humans and are one of the causes of the common cold. "The reason there is no specific treatment is that coronavirus es used to be so mild that nobody really cared," says Jasper Chan, a microbiologist at the University of Hong Kong.