Authors reply: Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) in dromedary camels: are dromedary camels a reservoir for MERS-CoV?

In fact, we mentioned in our paper [2] in detail that the cycle threshold (Ct) values in nasal and conjunctival swabs of the five MERS-CoV reverse transcriptionquantitative polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR) positive Omani camels ranged from as low as 15.74 to 36.29, indicating a high viral load in the former. Our results were confirmed in a recent report by Raj et al. [3], who demonstrated an even higher viral load (Ct values of 11.3 and 12.9) in a nasal swab of an eight-monthold camel from Qatar, sampled in February 2014. High loads of MERS-CoV nucleic acid in nasal swabs of dromedary camels from Saudi Arabia were also reported by Alagaili et al. [4].