Fewer than 500 Amur tigers (Panthera tigris altaica) remain in the wild. Due to low numbers and their solitary and reclusive nature, tiger sightings across their range in the Russian Far East and China are rare; sightings of sick tigers are rarer still. Serious neurologic disease observed in several wild tigers since 2001 suggested disease emergence in this endangered species.

During the summer of 2012, in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, a hitherto unknown coronavirus (CoV) was isolated from the sputum of a patient with acute pneumonia and renal failure. The isolate was provisionally called human coronavirus Erasmus Medical Center (EMC). Shortly thereafter, in September 2012, the same type of virus, named human coronavirus England, was recovered from a patient with severe respiratory illness who had been transferred from the Gulf region of the Middle East to London, United Kingdom (GenBank accession no. KC164505.2).

Influenza is vaccine-preventable; however, the burden of severe influenza in India remains unknown. We conducted a population-based study to estimate the incidence of laboratory confirmed influenza-associated hospitalizations in a rural community in western India.