TORONTO -- European researchers have found evidence that camels can be infected with the MERS coronavirus, a discovery that may help scientists tease out how people are contracting the new virus.
The researchers reported finding antibodies to MERS or a closely related coronavirus in the blood of camels from Oman on the Arabian Peninsula and also on the Canary Islands, an archipelago off northwestern Africa which is part of Spain.
This is the first confirmation of MERS infection in a species other than humans. And while it is suggestive that camels may be playing a role in the spread of the virus, it does not prove they are the source of the human infections.
"I think it shows that something -- either MERS or something that looks very similar to it -- has been going around in camels, and that that really needs to be looked at as a possible source. That's as far as we can go, I would say," senior author Dr. Marion Koopmans said in an interview.
She said finding evidence of prior infection in camels doesn't rule out the possibility that other animals may also be susceptible to the virus or may be the source or sources of human exposure.
"We shouldn't stop looking in other species based on this limited data that we have now," said Koopmans, who is in charge of the virology lab of the infectious disease centre of the Dutch National Institute of Public Health and is also a professor at Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam.
The fact that camels may be a source of infection adds urgency to the task of finding out how people are getting infected and trying to prevent future infections. That's because the animals are among a number slaughtered for sacrifice at the end of the Hajj, the massive annual pilgrimage that draws several million Muslims to the holy city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia.
To complete the responsibilities of the pilgrimage, each pilgrim must participate in the sacrifice of an animal; that participation often takes the form of paying for the animal and distributing the cooked meat to family members and the poor.
Camels are among the animals sacrificed during Eid al Adha -- the feast of sacrifice -- that concludes the Hajj. This year the pilgrimage is taking place in early to mid-October.
"These investigations are obviously time sensitive, especially given the Hajj coming up, the festival of sacrifice," said Dr. Kamran Khan, an infectious diseases physician at Toronto's St. Michael's Hospital who specializes in using airline traffic data to predict the global movement of diseases.
"I do think what this really does is helps guide some of the further investigations now. But there is certainly some time sensitivity around it."
Last year nearly 1.75 million foreign pilgrims travelled to Saudi Arabia for the Hajj. While the kingdom has announced this year's visas will be reduced, the possibility of spread of the virus from Saudi Arabia -- which has seen the lion's share of cases to date -- is a threat that has many in global public health on edge.
"It certainly makes me feel uncomfortable," Koopmans said when asked about the feast of sacrifice. "We would want to see studies in place soon."
To date there have been 94 confirmed cases of MERS; 46 of those people have died. All cases to date have originated in four Middle Eastern countries: Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.
The study was published in the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases.
