Credit Ian Mackay VDU Blog
# 8668
There’s the old story about the elderly gentleman who marries a young attractive woman, and after a few months friends tell him she is cheating. He refuses to believe it, but finally agrees to hire a private detective to follow her for a week.
A week later the P.I. comes back with photos of the wife meeting a strange man at a romantic restaurant, leaving in the man’s car, arriving at a motel, waiting in the car while the man registers, and embracing in front of a motel room door before going inside and turning off the lights.
Ever the optimist, the husband says `So what you are telling me is, you didn’t find anything conclusive . . . ‘
Which pretty much describes at least some of the reaction we’ve seen coming out of the Middle East regarding MERS-CoV and camels.
Despite compelling research linking the two, as long as there isn’t irrefutable evidence of camel-to-human transmission, some maintain it’s all just speculation. . . .
Today Dr. Ian Mackay provides an excellent overview (and links) on what we do know about MERS and camels. Follow the link below to read:
Camels and MERS: links to peer-reviewed scientific literature...
I thought this might be a useful page for anyone who would like to know just how much data has been generated that supports a link between camels and MERS-CoV, and studies that have shown near identical viral genomes from camels, and the humans in contact with them.
Its also worth nothing only 1 ~180nt PCR fragment from 1 bat in 1 study has had a MERS-CoV sequence detected in it and yet they are still considered the most likely ancestor of the MERS-CoV because bats seem to be the ancestral source of many CoVs.
Ian also has an updated world map (above) which now includes Iran in the MERS mix, and some thoughts on the demographic changes observed in the Jeddah cluster (see Jeddah changed the MERS-CoV age:sex landscape...).
