Emerging infectious diseases of zoonotic origin are shaping today's infectious disease field more than ever. In this article, we introduce and review three emerging zoonotic viruses. Novel hantaviruses emerged in the Americas in the mid-1990s as the cause of severe respiratory infections, designated hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, with case fatality rates of around 40%. Nipah virus emerged a few years later, causing respiratory infections and encephalitis in Southeast Asia, with case fatality rates ranging from 40% to more than 90%. A new coronavirus emerged in 2012 on the Arabian Peninsula with a clinical syndrome of acute respiratory infections, later designated as Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), and an initial case fatality rate of more than 40%. Our current state of knowledge on the pathogenicity of these three severe, emerging viral infections is discussed.
Keywords: Middle East respiratory syndrome; Nipah virus disease; emerging viruses; hantavirus pulmonary syndrome.