LONDON — A new virus from the same family as SARS which was discovered and sparked a global alert in September has now killed two people in Saudi Arabia and Qatar and the total number of cases has risen to six, the World Health Organization said Friday. The UN health agency issued a global alert in late September saying a virus previously unknown in humans had infected a 49-year-old Qatari who had recently traveled to Saudi Arabia, where another man with the same virus had died. On Friday, it said in a disease outbreak update that it had registered four more cases and that one of the new patients had died. “The additional cases have been identified as part of the enhanced surveillance in Saudi Arabia (3 cases, including 1 death) and Qatar (1 case),” the WHO said. The new virus shares some of the symptoms of SARS, or Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, which emerged in China in 2002 and killed around a tenth of the 8,000 people it infected worldwide. Among the symptoms in the confirmed cases are a fever, coughing and breathing difficulties. — Reuters
