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Inside global hunt for source of MERS

By National Geographic  
   May 16, 2014

The Index Patient: His name, two years later, is guarded within the privacy of medical files and a family compound of bereaved relatives, his wives, and his children. He was 60 years old. He was a businessman. He lived in Bishah, a small city southeast of the great Saudi port metropolis of Jeddah, and when he became too sick for the Bishah doctors to care for him properly, he was transported to Jeddah, feverish and coughing. There he lay, inside one of the tall white buildings of the Dr. Soliman Fakeeh Hospital, where a diagnostic physician called onto his case happened to be a virology specialist, an Egyptian physician named Ali Mohamed Zaki, who liked to pay close attention to the latest reports of pernicious infectious disease.

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