Coronavirus, a virus causing deadly Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome has been found in tears, according to a study.
Tear analysis is not only an effective means of diagnosing the infection, but also an unrecognized source of its spread if appropriate preventive measures are not taken, a study by the British Journal of Ophthalmology points out.
The tear samples were swabbed from the tear ducts of 36 patients suspected to be suffering from SARS in Singapore over a period of 12 days in April 2003. Most of those thought to have the infection were healthcare workers, including nurses.
Eight of these patients tested positive for SARS while chemical analysis of three of these patients confirmed the presence of the infection and in one of them the virus was found only in the tears.
These patients had recently become infected and were tested within nine days after they showed symptoms. The other five patients had no discernible evidence of the virus in their tear samples. But their symptoms had appeared 11 days earlier, suggesting that the tear duct sampling may be a sensitive test for early stage infection, the study observes.
