LONDON — Global health officials have alerted doctors to be on the lookout for a virus related to severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, but said there were no signs the disease was behaving like the respiratory syndrome that killed hundreds in 2003.
The World Health Organization announced this week that a new coronavirus had been found in a critically ill Qatari man who was being treated in London as well as in a Saudi Arabian man who died several months earlier. Genetic sequencing found the viruses in the two men to be nearly identical.
The two men might have been infected directly by animals, however, and there was no proof of human-to-human spread of the virus, agency spokesman Gregory Hartl said Thursday.
“This is not SARS, it is a new virus and very distinct from SARS,” he said. “There are still a lot of unanswered questions, so we cannot predict what might happen.”
Hartl said the agency could not elaborate on the men’s cases until investigations by national authorities were finished.
The new coronavirus is from a family of viruses that cause the common cold as well as the severe acute respiratory syndrome that killed about 800 people, mostly in Asia in a 2003 epidemic.
SARS jumped to people from civet cats and then mutated into a form easily spread among humans.
Front Section, Pages 7 on 09/28/2012