New Viruses

The WHO is reporting a new SARS-like virus: "The World Health Organization on Wednesday urged health workers around the world to report any patient with acute respiratory infection who may have travelled to Saudi Arabia or Qatar and been exposed to a new SARS-like virus confirmed in two people so far.
The United Nations agency put out a global alert on Sunday saying a new virus had infected a 49-year-old Qatari who had recently travelled to Saudi Arabia - where another man with an almost identical virus had died.
The Qatari remained critically ill in hospital in Britain, according to the WHO’s latest information as of Tuesday."According to an article in the Vancouver Sun: "The virus, known as a coronavirus also related to the common cold, comes from the same family as SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) which emerged in China in 2002. SARS infected 8,000 people worldwide and killed 800 of them before being brought under control."
The new coronavirus probably originates from bats.
Meanwhile Infection Control Today is reporting another new virus: "
An isolated outbreak of a deadly disease known as acute hemorrhagic fever, which killed two people and left one gravely ill in the Democratic Republic of Congo in the summer of 2009, was probably caused by a novel virus scientists have never seen before.
Described this week in the open-access journal PLoS Pathogens, the new microbe has been named Bas-Congo virus (BASV) after the province in the southwest corner of the Congo where the three people lived."  This new virus joins Ebola, Marburg and a number of other hemorragic viruses emerging due to unprecedented human contact with remote animals in remote places, a function of over population and natural resource exploitation - who knows what lethal virus will next emerge from the bush?