The Koyal Group Info Mag News: Some Creepy and other Not-so-Believable Science Research Discoveries

Have you ever imagined what the future would be like? Here is a hint as to what the latest discoveries will unfold within our lifetime. Unfortunately, we also found some unlikely stories about the past that try to make the advances of scientific development a kind of joke. Read on!

1. Last year, personalized embryonic stem cells became experimentally more viable with the successes made by the Oregon Health and Science University in cloning human embryos and collecting stem cells from them. Using those derived cells, they were able to produce cells into specialized cells usable for the skin or heart. This will allow doctors in the future to use such cells to generate entire organs or parts of them for transplant procedures.

Cut off your finger with a knife or lost an eye in an accident? A replacement can be generated, perhaps, in a matter of days or weeks, perhaps, using your own body as the source of original cells to produce cloned body parts since they claim that they may be able to generate such cells without using embryos. It is like real-life imitating fiction. Exciting but a bit scary and reminiscent of Frankenstein.

2. Was there water on Mars? Well, if NASA has it right, there might have been. Or wasn’t there? NASA’ Curiosity rover allegedly found a lake on the red planet which “could have supported” life more than three billion years ago. But the conclusion appears to be a big leap of faith, so to speak, for researchers to claim. Just because there is water does not mean there could have been life on Mars. Comets, perhaps hundreds or thousands of them. are basically made of ice and where they got that water somewhere in outer space would lead us to suppose that there is a lot of life out there. So far, we seem to be alone.

Besides, where is all that supposed lake water now? Could that lake have been formed by some other liquid or fluid, more volatile than water, such as methane, ammonia or some kind of mineral-based acid? Or could that lake have been merely a crater formed by an asteroid like many meteor-formed lakes we have on our planet?

In fact, the photo has all the evidences of a crater formed from a ballistic impact of a meteor rather than a lake that once held water. Notice the exact center where the tell-tale rebound of rock materials formed a small peak. Remember the popular slow-mo drop of water rebounding out? That is what happens with a meteor impact on solid ground. It forms a small peak on the center from the debris that are is thrown upward. A more exacting scientific inquiry and not speculations should be made before coming out with such “desperate” conclusions.

This piece of news is far from being a vindication of NASA. We need more proof of life — intelligent, if possible — to make us applaud. Even a college student will see through this unfounded claim.

3. A skull discovered in the Republic of Georgia apparently showed more ancient and more recent human characteristics. Evolutionists would feel confounded by this news as it would disrupt there belief that there was progression in the development of the Homo Sapiens species that we are. The conclusion the scientists reached, rather conveniently, was that more archaic humans apparently mated with the more advanced Homo Erectus or the first primitive erect humans before our “species” emerged.

Now this might be a rather surprising admission; but it is again a desperate and illogical hypothesis that throws cold water on the whole Theory of Evolution. It is basically saying that because some fossils show mixtures of pre-evolved and post-evolved characteristics then it could have only been the result of the reproduction of the two. But that is exactly like saying that a “zebronkey” – a mutant zebra that had features of a zebra and a donkey documented in Manila back in the 1970’s – was the product of the mating of a zebra and a donkey.

Again, it seems evolutionary scientific research has a lot of credibility check it has to undergo before we can accept its farfetched conclusions. Besides, a single toe bone does not a whole human being or so-called whole humanoid. With such sparse evidence, we wonder how scientists could confidently brag about their “latest discoveries”.

There are, to be sure, legitimate and amazing scientific discoveries out there; but these few we found online seem to be more like press release materials for fund-raising purposes rather than acceptable results of serious scientific inquiry.

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The Koyal Group Info Mag News │Climate change producing less-nutritious food

A study from a project co-chaired by former 1st District congressman Doug Bereuter says climate change threatens to undermine not only how much food can be grown but also the quality of that food, as altered weather patterns lead to a less desirable harvest.

Crops grown by many of the nation’s farmers have a lower nutritional content than they once did, according to the report by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

This Feb. 7, 2014, file photo shows the cracked-dry bed of the Almaden Reservoir in San Jose, Calif., where the state is suffering one of its worst droughts.  Climate change demands changes in how America grows food, according to a report from the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, or it will produce less food that is not as rich nutritionally.

Research indicates that higher carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have reduced the protein content in wheat, for example. And the International Rice Research Institute has warned that the quality of rice available to consumers will decline as temperatures rise, the report noted.

The council has been examining the effects of climate change on food for several months as part of a project co-chaired by former Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman and former Rep. Doug Bereuter, R-Neb., president emeritus of the Asia Foundation.

Others on the advisory group for the project are prominent agribusiness leaders, such as Jose Luis Prado, president of Quaker Foods North America, Paul E. Schickler, president of Dupont Pioneer, scientists, academic leaders, former Kansas Gov. John Carlin, now chair of the Kansas Bioscience Authority, and Howard Buffett, a Nebraska farmer and grandson of Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett.

The U.S. should embrace research into animal biology and plant management with the kind of enthusiasm it did space exploration in the 1960s, the council said, warning that the consequences of inaction could be severe.

“History has shown that with adequate resources and support, agriculture can meet growing production demands and adapt to some changes in climate,” Bereuter said in a news release. “But greater emphasis on adaptation must begin now.”

The report, titled Advancing Global Food Security in the Face of a Changing Climate, was released Thursday at the council’s Global Food Security Symposium 2014 in Washington, where 500 policymakers and scientists were gathered.

“Adaptation must begin now,” the report said. “Developing the necessary scientific breakthroughs and broadly disseminating them will require years, even decades of lead time.”

Climate change initially will produce both winners and losers when it comes to food production, the report said, but research has indicated that growing regions everywhere will eventually suffer from global warming.

The report calls on the U.S. government to integrate climate change adaptation into its global food security strategy. Recommendations include:

* Passing legislation for a long-term global food and nutrition security strategy.

* Increasing spending for agricultural research on climate change adaptation.

* Collecting better data and making information on weather more widely available to farmers. There are significant global data gaps right now on weather, water, crop performance, land use and consumer preferences.

* Increasing spending for partnerships between U.S. universities and those in low-income countries.

* Urging that food security be addressed through the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals.

Another conclusion, closer to the soil: Plant and animal germplasm preservation for domesticated and wild species needs to be a priority.

“As temperatures rise, rainfall patterns change and variability increases, farmers will need to figure out what their new normal might become, and, in fact, whether change is the new normal,” the report concluded.

The Koyal Group Info Mag News│Charged building material could make the renewable grid a reality

What if your cell phone didn’t come with a battery? Imagine, instead, if the material from which your phone was built was a battery.

The promise of strong load-bearing materials that can also work as batteries represents something of a holy grail for engineers. And in a letter published online in Nano Letters last week, a team of researchers from Vanderbilt University describes what it says is a breakthrough in turning that dream into an electrocharged reality.

The researchers etched nanopores into silicon layers, which were infused with a polyethylene oxide-ionic liquid composite and coated with an atomically thin layer of carbon. In doing so, they created small but strong supercapacitor battery systems, which stored electricity in a solid electrolyte, instead of using corrosive chemical liquids found in traditional batteries.

These supercapacitors could store and release about 98 percent of the energy that was used to charge them, and they held onto their charges even as they were squashed and stretched at pressures up to 44 pounds per square inch. Small pieces of them were even strong enough to hang a laptop from—a big, fat Dell, no less.

Although the supercapacitors resemble small charcoal wafers, they could theoretically be molded into just about any shape, including a cell phone’s casing or the chassis of a sedan.

They could also be charged—and evacuated of their charge—in less time than is the case for traditional batteries.

“We’ve demonstrated, for the first time, the simple proof-of-concept that this can be done,” says Cary Pint, an assistant professor in the university’s mechanical engineering department and one of the authors of the new paper. “Now we can extend this to all kinds of different materials systems to make practical composites with materials specifically tailored to a host of different types of applications. We see this as being just the tip of a very massive iceberg.”

Pint says potential applications for such materials would go well beyond “neat tech gadgets,” eventually becoming a “transformational technology” in everything from rocket ships to sedans to home building materials.

“These types of systems could range in size from electric powered aircraft all the way down to little tiny flying robots, where adding an extra on-board battery inhibits the potential capability of the system,” Pint says.

And they could help the world shift to the intermittencies of renewable energy power grids, where powerful batteries are needed to help keep the lights on when the sun is down or when the wind is not blowing.

“Using the materials that make up a home as the native platform for energy storage to complement intermittent resources could also open the door to improve the prospects for solar energy on the U.S. grid,” Pint says. “I personally believe that these types of multifunctional materials are critical to a sustainable electric grid system that integrates solar energy as a key power source.”

The Koyal Group Info Mag News│Breakthrough shows how DNA is 'edited' to correct genetic diseases

An international team of scientists has made a major step forward in our understanding of how enzymes 'edit' genes, paving the way for correcting genetic diseases in patients.

Researchers at the Universities of Bristol, Münster and the Lithuanian Institute of Biotechnology have observed the process by which a class of enzymes called CRISPR – pronounced 'crisper' – bind and alter the structure of DNA.

The results, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) today, provide a vital piece of the puzzle if these genome editing tools are ultimately going to be used to correct genetic diseases in humans.

CRISPR enzymes were first discovered in bacteria in the 1980s as an immune defence used by bacteria against invading viruses. Scientists have more recently shown that one type of CRISPR enzyme – Cas9 – can be used to edit the human genome - the complete set of genetic information for humans.

These enzymes have been tailored to accurately target a single combination of letters within the three billion base pairs of the DNA molecule. This is the equivalent of correcting a single misspelt word in a 23-volume encyclopaedia.

To find this needle in a haystack, CRISPR enzymes use a molecule of RNA - a nucleic acid similar in structure to DNA. The targeting process requires the CRISPR enzymes to pull apart the DNA strands and insert the RNA to form a sequence-specific structure called an 'R-loop'.

The global team tested the R-loop model using specially modified microscopes in which single DNA molecules are stretched in a magnetic field. By altering the twisting force on the DNA, the researchers could directly monitor R-loop formation events by individual CRISPR enzymes.

This allowed them to reveal previously hidden steps in the process and to probe the influence of the sequence of DNA bases.

Professor Mark Szczelkun, from Bristol University's School of Biochemistry, said: "An important challenge in exploiting these exciting genome editing tools is ensuring that only one specific location in a genome is targeted.

"Our single molecule assays have led to a greater understanding of the influence of DNA sequence on R-loop formation. In the future this will help in the rational re-engineering of CRISPR enzymes to increase their accuracy and minimise off-target effects. This will be vital if we are to ultimately apply these tools to correct genetic diseases in patients."

Did you know??

Blood Test Has Potential to Predict Alzheimer’s

The Koyal Group InfoMag New│Blood Test Has Potential to Predict Alzheimer’s

In March of this year, a team of Georgetown University scientists published research showing that, for the first time ever, a blood test has the potential to predict Alzheimer's disease before patients start showing symptoms. AACC is pleased to announce that a late-breaking session at the 2014 AACC Annual Meeting & Clinical Lab Expo in Chicago will expand upon this groundbreaking research and discuss why it could be the key to curing this devastating illness.

TEHRAN (FNA)- A blood test has the potential to predict Alzheimer’s disease before patients start showing symptoms, researchers reported. Now they expand upon this groundbreaking research and discuss why it could be the key to curing this devastating illness.

According to the World Health Organization, the number of Alzheimer's patients worldwide is expected to skyrocket from the 35.6 million individuals who lived with it in 2010 to 115.4 million by 2050. Currently, however, all efforts to cure or effectively treat the disease have failed. Experts believe one explanation for this lack of success could be that the window of opportunity for treating Alzheimer's has already closed by the time its symptoms manifest.

Enter the research team led by Howard Federoff, MD, PhD, executive dean at Georgetown University School of Medicine in Washington, D.C. In cognitively healthy adults age 70 and older, Federoff's team measured the levels of 10 lipids found in the blood to identify, with 90% accuracy, which study group participants would develop cognitive impairment over a 2-3 year period. If this 10-lipid test is validated in larger studies, it could help researchers to develop treatments for Alzheimer's that halt or slow the disease before it even begins. A blood test would also be easier to perform than current Alzheimer's tests that use brain imaging or hard-to-collect cerebrospinal fluid, meaning that the Federoff team's test could be used for population-wide Alzheimer's screening.

Amrita Cheema, PhD, one of the main investigators on Federoff's team, will give an in-depth lecture on the test's significance, the science behind it, and the research techniques used to develop it in the July 28 AACC session, "Lipidomics: A Powerful Approach to Identify Pre-clinical Memory Impairment in Older Adults." Cheema is an associate professor and co-director of the Proteomics and Metabolomics Shared Resource at Georgetown University.

"This discovery is a potentially enormous breakthrough in the fight against Alzheimer's," said AACC CEO Janet B. Kreizman. "If research aimed at a cure for Alzheimer's is to move forward, it is crucial that Alzheimer's clinical trials find a way to recruit patients who are still asymptomatic, since they are the ones most likely to respond to treatment. The Federoff team's test could be the answer to this problem, and it also demonstrates how laboratory medicine helps patients achieve better health -- by not only ensuring that patients receive timely and appropriate treatment, but also by enabling researchers to develop effective treatments in the first place."

More discoveries you might want to know about

The Koyal Group Info Mag News: Scientific split - the human genome breakthrough dividing former colleagues

The money men have moved in on a new technique for editing the human genome that promises to revolutionise the way many human diseases will be treated in the future. But Big Money has in the process divided a scientific community into two competing camps.

Some might see it has healthy scientific rivalry spilling over into commercial competition which could ultimately speed up medical innovation. But behind closed doors there is a desperate race to establish scientific and commercial priority over what could be the scientific discovery – and intellectual property – of the decade.

On the one side is a consortium of world-class researchers led by French-born Professor Emmanuelle Charpentier who made a key discovery behind the Crispr gene editing technique and has been promised $25m (£16m) by a group of venture capitalists to commercialise her invention for medical use.

On the other side is her former colleague and the co-discoverer of the gene-editing process, Professor Jennifer Doudna of the University of California, Berkeley, who has joined a rival consortium of researchers with $43m in venture capital to advance the Crispr technique into the clinic.

Each group has recruited a formidable panel of senior scientists as advisers. The Charpentier team, called Crispr Therapeutics, includes Nobel Laureate Craig Mello, the co-discoverer of a gene-silencing technique known as RNAi, and Daniel Anderson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who was the first person to show that Crispr can cure a genetic disease in an adult animal.

Meanwhile the Doudna team, known as Editas Medicine, includes the Harvard geneticist George Church, a pioneer in synthetic biology, and Feng Zhang of MIT and the Broad Institute, who successfully managed to get Crispr to work in human cells and was this month awarded the first US patent on the technique – much to the dismay of Professor Charpentier.

“I have to be careful what I say here. It is very surprising. But the fundamental discovery comes from my laboratory and no-one has told me that they have scooped me,” Professor Charpentier told The Independent.

“Be certain that this discovery did not happen only by chance. I have been thinking, defending and carrying this study from Austria to Sweden and now Germany,” she said.

Patent attorneys are now pouring over the rival patent applications, in particular the claims relating to who has priority over a key element of the Crispr technique called Cas9, a bacterial gene for an enzyme that snips both strands of the DNA double helix at the same place – a key feature of the gene-editing process.

Professor Charpentier said that she identified Cas9, the most important fundamental discovery behind Crispr (pronounced “crisper”), when she worked at Umea University in Sweden, before she had teamed up with Professor Doudna to co-author a scientific paper on Crispr-Cas9 published in August 2012 in the journal Science.

Professor Charpentier, who is now at the Hannover Medical School in Germany, said that Cas9 was in fact described for the first time in an earlier scientific paper, published in Nature in March 2011, under its former name of Csn1, which she had isolated from the bacterium Steptococcus pyogenes.

“I was the scientist who described the technology and I kept the intellectual property when I was in Sweden….Editas does not have access to the intellectual property of the patent where I’m the co-inventor,” Professor Charpentier said.

“I made the decision to do something in Europe and I made the decision not to do something with Editas Medicine. I’m trying to remain true to myself….The aim is to use Crispr-Cas9 as a kind of genetic medicine to treat serious diseases. The point about Cas9 is that it works in every cell and in every organism tested – its mind blowing,” she said.

For her part, Professor Doudna said there is room for both camps to develop new medical therapies based on Crispr-Cas9.

“Emmanuelle and I are excited to see this platform employed to help patients, and there are of course many different targets and strategies to be taken, providing opportunities for multiple companies in this space,” Professor Doudna said.

“In addition to start-ups, many existing companies are also interested in using the technology for various applications that extend beyond human therapeutics. I expect that the commercial landscape will continue to evolve as the technology matures,” she said.

The main barrier to using Crispr-Cas9, however, will be its safe and efficient delivery to the cells and tissues that need the genetic therapy. Professor Mello believes that the first treatments are likely to involve the genetic manipulation of stem cells in the laboratory, before transplantation back into the affected parts of the body.

“Delivery to cells within the context of the whole body, brain or other organ is very difficult and inefficient… This is why Crispr therapies will no doubt be limited for the foreseeable future to applications where stem cells can be modified one, or a few, at a time and then reintroduced after double checking that only the intended change was made,” Professor Mello said.

WHAT IS CRISPR?

The human genome consists of a long sequence of "letters" written in the code of the genetic alphabet - the three billion base-pairs of the DNA molecule. The gene-editing technique known as Crispr-Cas9 is able for the first time to delete or swap any of these letters, right down to changing a single base pair at any designated place in the genome.

Crispr, which stands for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, was originally discovered as a kind of immune system in bacteria to defend against invading viruses. Its potential for editing the genomes of animals, including humans, only came with the discovery of the Cas9 gene, an enzyme for cutting both strands of DNA, found in the bacterium Streptococcus pyogenes.

The commercial applications of Crispr, which could extend to treating genetic diseases and cancer, will depend to a great extent on Cas9 and who owns the intellectual property on this part of the invention. This is why patent disputes are likely to focus on who did what and when in terms of the Cas9 discovery. Emmanuelle Charpentier of Hannover Medical School in Germany and Jennifer Doudna of the University of California, Berkeley are both named as co-inventors on one patent.

Scientists discover how sperm and egg bind of the Koyal Group Info Mag News

A protein which allows a sperm and egg to bond together has been discovered by scientists in a breakthrough which could improve fertility treatments

A protein which allows sperm to ‘dock’ with an egg has been found in a discovery which could help infertile couples and lead to new contraceptives.

The molecule, named Juno, after the Roman goddess of fertility, is present on the surface of the egg and binds with a similar protein on the sperm cell.

Their meeting is the very first moment of conception.

In 2005, Japanese scientists discovered the male part of the processes but until now its counterpart has proved elusive.

"We have solved a long-standing mystery in biology by identifying the molecules displayed on all sperm and egg that must bind each other at the moment we were conceived," said lead researcher Dr Gavin Wright, from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Hinxton, Cambridgeshire.

"Without this essential interaction, fertilisation just cannot happen. We may be able to use this discovery to improve fertility treatments and develop new contraceptives."

Researchers believe that a protein on the male sperm – known as ‘Izumo’ – acts like a metal detector seeking out ‘Juno’ on a female egg.

They found that mice which did not have either ‘Juno’ or ‘Izumo’ molecules were unable to fuse together.

The research, reported in the journal Nature, also suggests that Juno plays a role in preventing additional sperm fusing with an already fertilised egg.

"The Izumo-Juno pairing is the first known essential interaction for sperm-egg recognition in any organism," said co-author Dr Enrica Bianchi, also from the Sanger Institute.

“The binding of the two proteins is very weak, which probably explains why this has remained a mystery until now."

Scientists discovered that 40 minutes after the initial binding of the sperm and egg, ‘Juno’ vanishes, stopping any other sperm from latching on.

Researchers claim this may help explain why as soon as an egg is fertilised by one sperm cell it puts up a barrier against others.

Fertilisation involving more than one sperm would lead to the formation of abnormal doomed embryos with too many chromosomes.

The scientists are now screening infertile women to see whether ‘Juno’ defects underlie their condition.

If they do, a simple genetic screening test could help doctors provide them with the most appropriate treatment while avoiding wasteful expense and stress.

Regular In-Vitro Fertilisation (IVF) treatment, with sperm randomly fertilising eggs in a laboratory dish, could not work without ‘Juno’.

However, it may be possible to bypass the natural mating of Izumo and Juno using intra-cytoplasmic sperm injection (Icsi). This is an increasingly popular method of IVF which involves injecting a sperm directly into an egg.

While ‘Juno’ is vital to initial egg and sperm binding, the scientists believe other proteins might be necessary to trigger the full fusion than leads to fertilisation.

But the Izumo-Juno interaction is an essential first step without which fertilisation cannot occur.

Both molecules are thought to exist throughout the mammalian animal kingdom. The scientists identified versions of ‘Izumo’ and ‘Juno’ in pigs, opposums and humans as well as mice.

Leading fertility expert Dr Allan Pacey, senior lecturer in reproduction and developmental medicine at the University of Sheffield, said: "The identification of the Juno protein opens up many exciting prospects. Perhaps the most obvious biomedical application of this finding is whether screening for this protein (or its gene in a blood sample) could be used as a test of fertility.

"We know that fertilisation failure in IVF is quite rare, and so I suspect the lack or dysfunction of this protein is probably not a major cause of infertility in couples.

“However, it would be useful to know how many women have eggs that lack this protein so we can properly assess this.

"The second, and perhaps most likely application, is whether scientists could devise drugs or vaccines that could block the way this protein works or how the sperm protein Izumo interacts with it. This could lead to a new and novel non-hormonal contraceptive for both humans and other species of mammals.”

The Koyal Group Info Mag News: A Virus found in camels

Google Plus: Evidence is mounting against camels as leading suspects in a deadly mystery that's claimed more than 100 lives in the Middle East.

The biological supervillain is the virus causing MERS-coV, short for Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, a type of coronavirus.

Since the first documented cases in spring 2012, MERS has sickened at least 339 people in Saudi Arabia alone and killed nearly a third of them, according to the country's Ministry of Health.

A recent surge in reported cases -- including 26 new ones this past weekend -- has fanned concern the outbreak might be shifting into a more dangerous phase.

 Saudi officials see spike in MERS virus

With any newly recognized virus, disease detectives start with a few key questions. What kind of illness does it cause? How is it spread? And where does it come from?

 Killer coronavirus in the Middle East WHO tracks new coronavirus to Middle East Health workers infected with coronavirus

With regard to that last question, a new paper leaves little doubt that at least one answer is camels.

Researchers from Columbia University, King Saud University and the New York-based EcoHealth Alliance managed to isolate live MERS virus from two single-humped camels, known as dromedaries.

Should I be concerned about new virus?

A genetic analysis found numerous substrains in the camel viruses, including one that perfectly matches a substrain isolated from a human patient. The findings are published in mBio, the open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology.

The attention on camels isn't new; in February, the same group published a finding that nearly three-quarters of camels in Saudi Arabia tested positive for past exposure to the MERS coronavirus.

The new paper still leaves many questions unanswered: For example, what other animals might harbor the virus? Could it be bats, as some have suggested?

"There might be another animal, but we don't know," says Dr. Ian Lipkin, who organized the research as director of the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health. "We need more in terms of surveillance."

Does the virus make camels sick? Researchers don't know, says Peter Daszak, another study author and president of the EcoHealth Alliance, which researches links between animal health and human disease.

Perhaps most urgent: Has something recently changed to make MERS-coV more dangerous?

Here, some of the evidence is reassuring. Any avid mystery reader knows that a watchdog who doesn't bark can be an important clue. With MERS, there is a lack of alarm bells from the laboratory; so far there is no evidence that the virus is changing to attack people more aggressively or to spread more easily.

There isn't enough evidence to draw a firm conclusion, says Dr. Mark Denison, a leading expert on coronaviruses and a professor of pediatrics at Vanderbilt University. It also remains to be seen whether humans are being infected by more than one of the substrains found in camels. "There's a lot more work that would need to be done" to prove it, he says.

Those who study MERS-coV say it's crucial to pin down just how the virus is transmitted.

"We need to know what people are most at risk," Daszak says. "We don't know if they're involved in camel racing, camel breeding, camel slaughter -- that's really critical right now."

Lipkin says the virus likely spreads in a variety of ways, but he'd like to see more aggressive steps taken to prevent the possibility of people being infected by eating camel meat or drinking raw, unpasteurized camel milk -- both of which are common in Saudi Arabia.

He says the Saudis will face special concerns again this fall when millions descend on the holy cities of Mecca and Medina for the Hajj pilgrimage. As part of the ritual, animals are sacrificed, and their meat shipped all over the world to help feed the hungry.

Saudis: More deaths from respiratory syndrome

"The butchery will begin in three or four months' time, and we have to have measures in place to ensure that the animals aren't infected," Lipkin says. For example, he says, officials could decide to forbid the slaughter of young camels for food since younger animals are more likely to carry the MERS virus.

Dr. David Swerdlow, who heads the team responsible for tracking MERS at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, says the Saudi government took steps to discourage the spread of the virus during last year's Hajj, including posting warnings to discourage people older than 65, pregnant women or those who were immune-compromised from making the pilgrimage.

Health authorities have not yet decided what steps to take this year, Swerdlow says, but the United States is watching the situation closely.

"Any time you have an emerging infection that has a high case fatality rate, that's been around for over a year, that has caused illness in multiple countries, that's caused illness in travelers and health care workers, and for which there is no treatment or vaccine, we're concerned. We've been concerned for a year and a half, and we remain concerned."