The first case of human to human transmission of a possibly fatal respiratory illness that looks to be somewhat comparable to Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) showed up in Britain this week. The patient is under treatment at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital Intensive care unit in Birmingham and is thought to have been given the infection from a family relative that recently had come back from travel in the Middle East.
The relative is considered severely ill and was transferred from Birmingham to the Manchester Wythenshawe hospital to be treated with an ECMO machine. The ECMO machine helps to put oxygen back into the blood when the lungs are failing and is considered a last resort. Another patient of the illness was flown in into the UK from Quatar to be treated and has been ill at London’s St. Thomas’ Hospital since last September.
UK labs have been told to test all new cases of severe pneumonia that do not have a known cause to make sure they are not the virus in an attempt to stop a lethal outbreak of the SARS like virus across the UK.
The Health Protection Agency reassured that right now the risk is ‘low’ because the virus is limited and does not have an easy capacity for spreading. However, a spokesperson for the Health Agency added that it could start to mutate and they do not know how it will behave in the future.
The new virus appears to be a relative of the SARS value that has killed about half of those who contracted the virus; however, experts continue to reiterate that this is not the same virus. When SARS did first outbreak only four cases were ever reported in the UK and all were imported cases.
