Dated November 2013. The authors collected bat feces from sites in Bisha, Saudi Arabia found less than 1-12 kilometers from the place of employment or home of an index case-patient there, and performed total nucleic acid extraction, and used PCR to amplify a chosen segment that showed 100% nucleotide identity correlation between human and bat virus.

Available from PubMedCentral at this link.

Remarkably, it was reported by Reuters on June 3, 2014, that Memish, who was Deputy Health Minister in Saudi Arabia when the paper was published, later lost his position for political reasons, after he was criticized by international organizations for failure to collaborate with international laboratories on MERS research. The Reuters article reported that 575 people in the kingdom were then infected with MERS, and that the disease had "spread around the world."

(Thanks to Juan Weiss for this entry and its interpretation.)