(lively music) - I'm Paris Jackson in the Crosscut KCTS9 Newsroom.

Washington State University researchers are working to learn more about an obscure coronavirus found in camels in Sub-Saharan and East Africa.

The team, a part of WSU's Global Health program, say a rural area in northern Kenya could be of global concern by being the next place that a pandemic could come from.

The host for the virus, dromedary camels.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers were eyeing a deadly virus known to jump from camels to humans, called Middle East Respiratory Syndrome.

In 2012, the virus was discovered in Saudi Arabia.

Since then, it's killed about one out of every three patients who contracted it, according to the World Health Organization.

WSU epidemiologists found three cases of the virus, but all asymptomatic, in Kenya.

Since the study started more than two years ago, not one test has yielded a positive result, but the research continues.

(soft music) I'm Paris Jackson.

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