New SARS-Like Virus Infects Both Human and Animal Cells

sciencehabit writes "A SARS-like virus discovered this summer in the Middle East may infect more than just humans. The pathogen, a close cousin to the one that caused the 2002 to 2003 SARS outbreak, may also be able to infect cells from pigs and a wide range of bat species, researchers report today (abstract). The findings may help public health officials track the source of the outbreak and identify the role of wild animals and livestock in spreading the virus, researchers say."

Question for this crowd

[dorpus]

I am a statistician. In light of this year's early flu epidemic, I am tasked with modeling ER flu counts as a function of time.

When I plot the residual graph (observed - expected), I get upward spikes lasting about a week, corresponding to epidemics of particular strains. But there are also downward spikes lasting about a week. They occur at random, independent of the upward spikes. So what do I call such downward spikes? I've searched around but there is no antonym for "epidemic".

That is very rapid publication

[damn_registrars]

The full text (available for free from anywhere - hooray for open access!)) states that the patient reported in June of this year. Paper was submitted on October 24, accepted November 1, and published November 20.

This also shows how good next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies have become. They were able to sequence and assemble an entire virus genome in ~4 months or (likely) less, from a single infected human.