In a cautionary report on Thursday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) warned of a deadly new virus that has sickened more than a dozen people and killed eight in the Arabian peninsula and the U.K. so far.
No cases of the new virus -- a coronavirus that experts say had previously never been seen in humans -- have been reported in the United States. Still, the CDC has advised anyone visiting countries in or near the Arabian peninsula, including Iraq, Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, to see a doctor if a fever or symptoms of a lower respiratory illness develop within 10 days of their travels.
As Reuters points out, the new virus is "part of the same family of viruses as the common cold and the deadly outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) that first emerged in Asia in 2003."
Since April last year, a total of 14 people were confirmed to have been infected by the new coronavirus. Nine of them were infected in either Saudi Arabia, Qatar or Jordan; three people in the U.K. have also been infected.
"In the U.K., an infected man likely spread the virus to two family members. He had recently traveled to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and got sick before returning to the U.K.," according to a CDC release on the virus. The man's son, one of the family members who was infected, died last month.
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