Download China has yet to report any human infection caused by a new member of the family of viruses that cause the common cold as well as SARS, the country's top disease-control department said on Thursday. The Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention said the new coronavirus, which causes respiratory symptoms that many fear is SARS-like in a patient in Qatar and killed another person in Saudi Arabia this year, has not been found in China. And the center will be able to identify people infected with the virus in China using part of the virus' RNA sequence that was passed on by UK health authorities, said Wang Shiwen, an official of the center's viral disease prevention and control department. "We got part of its RNA sequence from Britain's Health Protection Agency," he said. Britain's Health Protection Agency said on its website this week that the new coronavirus, which infected a man from Qatar who is being treated in the UK, is "different from any (coronaviruses) that have previously been identified in humans". The 49-year-old patient was transferred to Britain on Sept 11 because of the severity of his condition. On Tuesday, the World Health Organization confirmed the two cases were from the Arabian Peninsula. However, it emphasized that the virus is not the one that causes SARS, severe acute respiratory syndrome, which killed about 800 people, most of them in Asia, in 2003. |