Acute Renal Failure In 2003 Probable SARS-CoV Cases
Recombinomics Commentary 22:15
September 25, 2012

He is now in a critical condition at Guy's and St Thomas' hospital in London.

"The patient, who has been isolated, is receiving extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (Ecmo) treatment, which delivers oxygen to the blood outside the body when the lungs are not able to," the hospital said in a statement.

Britain's Health Protection Agency also said the virus was from the same family as SARS but said it was different to any previously identified in humans, adding that it caused "acute respiratory illness".

WHO spokesman Gregory Haertl stressed that the new virus was not SARS itself, pointing out that what sets the new virus apart was that it caused rapid kidney failure.

Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) is caused by a new coronavirus, and results in respiratory failure. Acute renal failure (ARF) may also occur and/or complicate the disease course

RESULTS: Patients were assigned to ARF (n = 13; 17%) and non-ARF groups (n = 65).

CONCLUSIONS: Development of ARF during the disease course in SARS patients is associated with catastrophic outcome.

The above comments (in red) describe the current Qatar case which is in critical condition in London and on an ECMO machine.  The UK HPA has acknowledged that the coronavirus (CoV) belonged to the same family as the novel SARS CoV which caused the SARS cases reported in 2003.  However, WHO has noted that the 2012 cases had rapid kidney (renal) failure.

In Taiwan, a sub-set of the confirmed or probable (those who died with SARS symptoms but were cremeated prior to sample collection) SARS cases developed acute renal failure, which were described in the above paper entitled “Acute renal failure in patients with severe acute respiratory syndrome”, which agreed (see above comments in blue) with a similar paper on 2003 SARS cases in Hong Kong.  Both studies noted that a subset of SARS cases developed rapid kidney failure which was linked to a fatal outcome.

It is likely that the two confirmed 2012 SARS CoV-like cases represent a small subset of cases which are fatal or severe and are linked to rapid kidney failure, which was observed in 2003 SARS cases, such as the reported examples in Taiwan or Hong Kong.