How medical sleuths stopped a deadly new SARS-like virus in its
tracks Explore This Story Four months ago, a mucus sample
arrived in Dr. Ali Mohamed Zaki’s laboratory in Saudi Arabia.
The mucus had been coughed up by a 60-year-old Saudi Arabian man
with a strange case of pneumonia. He had been admitted to the
Dr. Soliman Fakeeh hospital in Jeddah on June 13; soon after,
his kidneys began to fail. Eleven days after being hospitalized,
the man was dead. When the patient was admitted, Zaki was
working in the hospital’s virology lab, which he helped
establish in 1994. He was sent samples of the patient’s sputum —
mucus coughed up from his lungs. Eventually, this spot of sputum
would lead Zaki to the discovery of a virus never before seen in
humans: a novel coronavirus, the same type of virus behind the
SARS outbreak in 2003 that swept across 30 countries and killed
approximately 800 people, including 44 Torontonians. Zaki’s
discovery — and his decision to post it online — touched off a
chain of events that quickl