A electron microscope image of a coronavirus is seen in this undated picture provided by the Health Protection Agency in London February 19, 2013.

LONDON | Wed Mar 13, 2013 4:38pm EDT

LONDON (Reuters) - Scientists have worked out how a deadly new virus which was unknown in humans until last year is able to infect human cells and cause severe, potentially fatal damage to the lungs.

In one of the first detailed studies of the virus - which emerged in the Middle East and has so far infected 15 people worldwide, killing nine of them - Dutch researchers identified a cell surface protein it uses to enter and infect human cells.

The finding, published in the journal Nature, came as the World Health Organization (WHO) confirmed the 15th case of the virus, known as novel coronavirus or NCoV, in a male patient in Saudi Arabia who died on March 2.

Other cases have been in Jordan and Qatar, and in patients in Germany and Britain linked to travel in the Middle East.

NCoV is from the same family of viruses as those that cause common colds and the one that caused the deadly outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) that first emerged in Asia in 2003.

The WHO first issued an international alert about it in September after it was identified in a Qatari man in Britain who had recently been in Saudi Arabia.

A study published last month found that NCoV was well adapted to infecting human cells and may be treatable with medicines similar to the ones used for SARS, which killed a tenth of the 8,000 people it infected.

In this latest study, led by Bart Haagmans at the Erasmus Medical Center in The Netherlands, researchers set out to find how the virus got into cells - which receptors it used - and then to find out where in the body those receptors were common.

POTENTIAL VACCINES

"Once you can identify the receptor and you know the distribution of the receptor in the body, then you can get more information on the pathogenesis (the way it infects people) of the virus and the possibility for transmission," Haagmans said in a telephone interview.

Researchers identified the key receptor for the disease as a cell surface protein called dipeptidyl peptidase 4 (DPP4).

They also found cells containing DPP4 receptors were common in the lower respiratory tract but not in the upper respiratory tract - giving clues to why the virus causes illness in the lungs rather than in the nose and throat as a cold virus would.

The findings should help researchers find ways of developing potential drugs or vaccines to block the DPP4 receptors and prevent infection, Haagmans said.

A few drugs that block DPP4 receptors are already on the market, licensed for use in diabetes, but Haagmans said his team already tried using those to stop the virus in laboratory tests and found they did not work.

He said, however, that the team was working with other molecules that might block the receptors and could form the basis for developing a potential vaccine.

Initial analysis by scientists at Britain's Health Protection Agency last year found that NCoV's closest relatives were most probably bat viruses.

Yet further work by a research team in Germany suggests NCoV may have come through an intermediary - possibly goats.

Haagmans said since DPP4 receptors were also present in other species, including bats, his findings showed it was feasible the virus came from bats. He said the idea that goats may have been an intermediary also looked feasible.

(Reporting by Kate Kelland; Editing by Pravin Char)

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Manatee rehab team members take a blood sample from a rescued manatee, exposed to Red Tide in Southwest Florida, during treatment at the David A. Straz Jr. Manatee Hospital at Tampa's Lowry Park Zoo, Florida, March 13, 2013.

TAMPA, Florida | Thu Mar 14, 2013 2:59pm EDT

TAMPA, Florida (Reuters) - Virginia Edmonds, standing in shallow water, used her legs to slowly nudge an ailing young manatee to one side of a treatment pool. A half dozen other female members of a manatee rehabilitation team hovered close by - one with a syringe - waiting for the signal.

"OK!" Edmonds called, as the others jumped in and threw a mat over the manatee to try and hold it still.

The 545-pound (247-kg) mammal bucked, thrashed, rolled and tossed the women off before they could inject an antibiotic; just one minor challenge in an effort to rescue and treat members of this endangered species that are dying in record numbers from an algae bloom.

The so-called Red Tide algae bloom has killed a total of 181 manatees so far this year, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.

That figure already surpasses the highest number of Red Tide manatee deaths on record - 151 in 1996 - and experts expect the number to keep rising through the spring.

"We'll probably have Red Tide victims several more months," said Dr. Larry Killmar, head of animal science and conservation at Tampa's Lowry Park Zoo, which is home to the manatee rehab team.

So far 12 rescued manatees have been brought in for treatment from Red Tide poisoning.

"We're not even getting a chance to work on many of them," Killmar said of the large number of deaths. "If we can get them early enough, we can save them."

TOXINS IN THE WATER

The problem, Killmar and other experts note, was Florida's warm winter, which appears to have sparked an earlier-than- normal algae bloom in the Gulf of Mexico along a 70-mile (112-km) swath of southwest Florida's coast, home to a large share of the state's estimated 5,000 manatees.

The naturally occurring algae that blooms into Red Tide carries toxins that are usually inhaled by manatees when they come up for air, typically every 20 minutes. But now they animals are also ingesting the toxins when they eat, after the Red Tide saturated sea grasses the manatees graze on, Killmar said.

The toxins spark seizures and paralyze the manatees, which struggle to breathe or surface for air - causing them to drown.

Most of the victims have been found in coastal rivers in the area of Fort Myers.

"Most are passed out when they come in," said Edmonds, the animal care manager of Florida mammals at Lowry Park Zoo. After they are brought in by a rescue team from the wildlife conservation commission, the manatees immediately receive an injection of the anti-toxin atropine and the first of three possible antibiotic injections.

For the past few weeks, staff members in the zoo's manatee hospital stood in shallow pool waters around the clock to help keep the manatees' heads above water.

"One woke up in 15 minutes," Edmonds said. Others take hours, possibly depending on the length of time they were exposed to Red Tide.

To make room for more critical care patients, two recovered manatees were sent to Sea World last week and three other Red Tide survivors are headed to Homosassa Springs Wildlife State Park this week.

The animals cannot be released back into the wild until the Red Tide dissipates because they will migrate back to the same area and become sick once again.

Meanwhile, the others will stay at the zoo's manatee hospital with several other resident patients recovering from a mixture of ailments, including boat strikes, which are one of the biggest killers of manatees.

HELPING HANDS

They manatees will be monitored and continue to get follow-up antibiotic injections like the one Edmonds and her team were trying to administer to a feisty 2-year-old male manatee on Wednesday.

About 20 zoo spectators had gathered to watch the unexpected display, holding up cameras and placing toddlers on their shoulders to see.

"I want to help," 9-year-old Ben Arnett of Englewood, Florida, whispered to his brother, 11-year-old Josh, an aspiring marine biologist.

Normally it is against state law to touch, chase, harass and - in one recent notorious case that unleashed public outrage and brought criminal charges - to ride manatees. But now fast-thinking residents are playing a critical role in saving them - holding their heads above the water until rescuers arrive.

The state released a hotline number for residents to call if they see a distressed manatee. "If they didn't have people in the public trying to help," said Lee Ann Rottman, the zoo's animal curator, "those manatees wouldn't make it."

(Editing by David Adams, Eric Walsh and Dan Grebler)

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A White Rhino and her calf walk in the dusk light in Pilanesberg National Park in South Africa's North West Province April 19, 2012.

JOHANNESBURG | Thu Dec 27, 2012 5:56am EST

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - Africa's biggest animals were poached in near record numbers in 2012, with surging demand for horn and ivory from Asia driving the slaughter of rhinos and elephants.

By mid-December, poachers had killed 633 rhinos in South Africa, according to environment ministry figures.

That marks a new annual peak in the country that is home to most of the continent's rhinos, and a sharp rise from the record 448 poached last year and the mere handful of deaths recorded a decade ago.

Elsewhere in Africa, the slaughter of elephants continued unabated, with mass killings reported in Cameroon and Democratic Republic of Congo.

According to conservation group TRAFFIC, which monitors global trade in animals and plants, the amount of ivory seized will likely drop from 2011, when a record number of big hauls were made globally. But the trend remains grim.

"It looks like 2012 is another bumper year for trade in illegal ivory though it is unlikely to top 2011," said Tom Milliken, who manages TRAFFIC's Elephant Trade Information System.

In 2011, an estimated 40 metric tons of illegal ivory was seized worldwide, representing thousands of dead elephants. So far this year about 28 metric tons has reportedly been seized but the number is expected to climb as more data comes in.

"The last four years since 2009 are four of our five highest volume years in illegal ivory trade," said Milliken.

Demand for ivory as ornamental items is rising fast in Asia, in tandem with growing Chinese influence and investment in Africa, which has opened the door wider for illicit trade in elephants and other animals.

Rhino horn has been used for centuries in Chinese medicine, where it was ground into powder to treat a range of maladies including rheumatism, gout and even possession by devils.

WAR AND ORGANISED CRIME

Ivory smuggling has also been linked to conflict, and last week the United Nations Security Council called for an investigation into the alleged involvement in the trade of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) in Uganda.

Led by warlord Joseph Kony, who is being hunted by an African Union and U.S.-backed military force, the LRA is accused of terrorizing the country's north for over 20 years through the abduction of children to use as fighters and sex slaves.

"The illegal killings of large number of elephants for their ivory are increasingly involving organized crime and in some cases well armed rebel militias," the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) said in a statement this week.

"In Bouba N'Djida National Park, in northern Cameroon, up to 450 elephants were allegedly killed by groups from Chad and the Sudan early this year," said CITES, which is an international agreement that oversees trade in wildlife.

In the case of rhino horn, demand has also been growing in Vietnam, where a newly affluent class has been buying it to treat ailments ranging from hangovers to cancer.

The claims have no basis in science but demand has pushed the price of the horn up to $65,000 a kilogram on the streets of Hanoi, making it more expensive than gold.

Most of the rhino killings take place in South Africa's Kruger National Park.

Gangs armed with firearms and night-vision goggles enter from neighboring Mozambique, from where observers say the horn is often smuggled out through the same routes used to bring illegal drugs from Southeast Asia into Africa.

"Kruger is a national park the size of Israel and it is incredibly difficult to police," said Julian Rademeyer, author of 'Killing for Profit', a book published this year that examines the international rhino horn trade.

"You have very advanced international syndicates run like business operations that are very good at getting horn out of here," he told Reuters. Rademeyer expects the number of rhino killings to rise even higher next year, pushing the population closer to a tipping point that leads to its decline.

South Africa has deployed its military to patrol Kruger while its tax agency SARS and police have stepped up the fight.

But it also lost ground in 2012 due to a two-month strike by National Park workers and corruption within the ranks of the park service that undermined its anti-poaching efforts.

South Africa hosts virtually the entire population of white rhino - 18,800 head or 93 percent - and about 40 percent of Africa's much rarer black rhino.

Africa's elephant population varies. Estimates for the numbers in Botswana are as high as 150,000 but in parts of central and west Africa the animal is highly endangered.

"Central Africa has been bleeding ivory but for the last few years there has also been an upsurge in poaching in Kenya, Tanzania and Mozambique," said Milliken.

Trade in rhino horn is strictly prohibited under CITES while that for ivory is mostly illegal.

(Editing by John Stonestreet)

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Malaysian soldiers prepare their protective gear prior to the slaughter of pigs at a farm in Sungai Nipah, 60 miles southwest of Kuala Lumpur, after an outbreak of the virus that later came to be known as Nipah virus. March 20, 1999.

HONG KONG | Fri Aug 3, 2012 5:47pm EDT

HONG KONG (Reuters) - A virus that is very similar to the deadly Nipah and Hendra viruses has been discovered in fruit bats in Australia and researchers are hoping it can help them find ways to fight those highly dangerous cousins.

The Nipah virus kills 40-75 percent of the people it infects while the Hendra virus, which normally affects horses, kills more than 50 percent of the people it infects.

But the newly discovered Cedar virus, with 90 percent of its genes identical to those of Hendra and Nipah, failed to cause any disease when researchers injected it into rats, guinea pigs and ferrets, they wrote in a paper published on Friday in the journal PLoS Pathogens (Public Library of Science).

They are now comparing the DNA of all three viruses to tease out genes that are responsible for the deadliness of the Nipah and Hendra, said lead author Gary Crameri, at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation's Australian Animal Health Laboratory.

"We have already done genetic analyses and identified those things that are different between Hendra/Nipah and the Cedar," Crameri said in a telephone interview.

"Our plan now is to genetically engineer these viruses so we can take some parts of the Hendra genome that don't appear in Cedar but play some role in how deadly they are, put them into Cedar and then do infection trials with the new hybrid virus and see if it is as deadly."

Researchers hope to home in on the rogue genes to find cures for Nipah and Hendra, which are also found in bats.

"There is no secret that the pathogenicity of the Hendra and Nipah lie in their genes and this will help us narrow down some of the options. From there, we can start to think about therapeutic approaches, new drugs that we can use to target these viruses so that when people get infected, we can treat them, something we don't have now," Crameri said.

Bats are a natural reservoir for many viruses, including highly pathogenic ones like rabies, Ebola, SARS, Hendra and Nipah. Although Cedar appears not to cause any disease in the few animal species that researchers tested the virus on, it is not known if it causes disease in people.

A Nipah outbreak in 1998 killed at least 105 pig farmers in Malaysia and one abattoir worker in Singapore. There have been numerous outbreaks since in Bangladesh and India.

While the cases in Malaysia and Singapore were due to contact with infected pigs, the South Asian outbreaks were mostly due to consumption of raw date palm juice that had been contaminated with urine or droppings from infected fruit bats.

The Hendra virus kills 75 percent of the horses it infects. While it rarely jumps from horse to people, four of the 7 human cases recorded since 1994 in Australia have resulted in death.

(Editing by Robert Birsel)

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