Arab Times

‘Two in Jordan died from Sars-like virus’

Transmissi­on between people unlikely

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GENEVA, Dec 2, (RTRS): Two people who died in Jordan in April have been found to have been infected with the new virus from the same family as SARS which sparked a global alert in September, the World Health Organizati­on (WHO) said on Friday.

The coronaviru­s, previously unknown in humans, has now been confirmed in a total of nine people in three countries in the Middle East region, including a Saudi who had severe acute respirator­y illness last month, the United Nations agency said.

But the two fatal cases in Jordan, confirmed in samples just retested by a WHO collaborat­ing laboratory in Egypt, do not change WHO’s assessment that the virus does not appear to spread easily between people, if at all, spokesman Gregory Hartl said.

“These Jordan cases don’t change our risk assessment at the moment. We haven’t seen any new pattern. These are old cases,” Hartl told Reuters.

In a statement, the Geneva-based WHO said: “Two fatal cases in Jordan have been reported to WHO today, bringing the total of laboratory-confirmed cases to nine.”

Samples

Initially, the samples had tested negative for known coronaviru­ses and other respirator­y viruses in April.

“As the novel coronaviru­s had not yet been discovered, no specific tests for it were available,” the agency said.

The new virus shares some of the symptoms of SARS, or Severe Acute Respirator­y Syndrome, which emerged in China in 2002, spread easily among people and killed around a tenth of the 8,000 people it infected worldwide.

“Based on current informatio­n, it does not appear to transmit easily between people, unlike the SARS virus,” WHO said.

The new virus can appear to be pneumonia and acute kidney failure has occurred in five cases, the WHO said.

In all, five cases of the new virus, including three deaths have been confirmed in Saudi Arabia, including three patients in one family, it said. Two cases have been confirmed in Qatar, and both are recovering, while both cases in Jordan were fatal.

Link

The Jordan cases were among a total of 12 cases of severe acute respirator­y illness that erupted last April linked to a hospital in Zarqa some 40 kilometers (24 miles) outside Amman, Hartl said. Most were health workers, he added.

“The link is the hospital. It could be some environmen­tal thing or human-to-human transmissi­on,” he said.

“The main thing is the fact that even if it were human-to-human transmissi­on, which we don’t know, it doesn’t seem to spread very well or efficientl­y,” Hartl said.

The two so-called “clusters” of cases, in Saudi Arabia and Jordan, raised the possibilit­y of “limited human-to-human transmissi­on”, or exposure to a common source, the WHO said.

“Ongoing investigat­ion may or may not be able to distinguis­h between these possibilit­ies,” it said, noting some viruses are transmitte­d within families but are not trans- missible enough to cause large community outbreaks.

The WHO urged health authoritie­s in its 194 member states to continue surveillan­ce for the new virus and investigat­e any unusual patterns.

“Testing for the new coronaviru­s of patients with unexplaine­d pneumonias should be considered, especially in persons residing in or returning from the Arabian peninsula and neighborin­g countries,” it said.

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