As scientists continue to search for a solution to the Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), a new report strongly indicates the virus was passed from camels to humans.

According to the Associated Press, researchers have published a new study in the New England Journal of Medicine investigating the death of a 44-year-old camels owner in Saudi Arabia. In Nov., the man died of MERS and the new report is among the strongest evidence to date supporting the theory that camels contributed heavily to the spread of the virus.

MERS is known to start with flu-like symptoms such as fever and cough, but can lead to shortness of breath, pneumonia and ultimately death as it worsens. The World Health Organization (WHO) has already recognized it as a problem, but will not declare it a pandemic, like the SARS outbreak in 2002 and 2003.

"All the evidence points to camels being the culprit. This is probably the first time the virus sequence is identical and suggests this is a case of transmission," Jonathan Ball, a professor of virology at Nottingham University, told BBC News. "One of the things that hasn't been resolved is whether or not it is respiratory transmission. The man was administering nose drops to the camel, but there are also reasonable amounts of virus in camel milk."

MERS first appeared about two years ago and has since spread from Saudi Arabia to the U.S. and Europe, infecting about 800 and killing 300, the AP reported. The vast majority has been in or near Saudi Arabia and nearly all cases outside have been connected to people who recently traveled there. Scientists have suspected camels as the culprit in the past, but this study offers hard evidence.

"This work further supports camels as a source for Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus and is the first to isolate the virus from a camel," Paul Kellam, of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, told BBC News.

Still, MERS has been transferred from human to human as well, but only in instances of close contact, such as when health care workers treat a patient. In the case of the 44-year-old Saudi man, his camels reportedly became ill in Oct. and he did so shortly after. The MERS virus is known to attack patients who are already sick and the man was hospitalized later in Nov.

"As with other studies recently published, the camels were sampled after the human patient was diagnosed, making direction of infection difficult to prove," Kellam said. "To be definitive, camel herds will need to be prospectively followed and showed to be infected with Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus and infectious prior to a documented transmission event to a human."

Related