last year, the infectious disease and public health communities learned of a new severe acute respiratory infection in Saudi Arabia. The stunningly rapid identification of the causative organism, the development of a diagnostic assay, online and ahead-of-print publishing, and heightened global surveillance efforts have made it possible to track the slow emergence of this new, often deadly infection. In September 2012, a post on ProMED-mail reported that a novel human coronavirus had been isolated from the sputum of a 60-year-old Saudi Arabian man with pneumonia. (ProMED-mail, found at www.promedniail.org, is a free, Internet based global reporting system from the International Society for Infectious Diseases that rapidly disseminates information on outbreaks of infectious disease and toxin