The deadly new virus emerging from the Middle East should not be compared with the earlier SARS disease, researchers warn today.
A German study of the new MERS virus has found major differences from SARS in the way the virus attacks patients.
Both viruses come from the same family of coronaviruses and both cause severe pneumonia.
World Health Organisation director general Dr Margaret Chan has warned the disease, known as Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, may be the greatest health threat currently facing the world.
The disease has proved highly infectious, wreaking havoc in one hospital in Saudi Arabia. So far some 33 deaths and another 25 cases have been reported globally.
The German doctors have studied the case of a man, aged 73, who died in Munich in April.
Reporting in The Lancet they say it is possible that MERS can replicate in the kidneys.
Researcher Professor Christian Drosten, of Klinikum Schwabing, Munich, Germany, said: "In the absence of qualitative laboratory data from well-documented MERS cases, most of these considerations were up to now made upon an assumed analogy to SARS. However, we’re now finding that certain elementary traits of the MERS virus appear to be different to SARS."
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