There is a new disease afoot, one that has killed nine people since first being identified in Saudi Arabia in last year. The perpetrator, novel coronavirus or NCoV, is worrisome, but on a small scale for now. It’s infected 15 people in four countries, including a clustered outbreak in the United Kingdom, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Scientists are working hard to analyze the virus and prevent its spread.

Perhaps, then, the more troublesome aspect of the illness is the light it shines on how disease—and what we know about disease—travels through our interconnected world.

“Today the world is one big virological blender,” Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy told Reuters. “And if [NCoV] sustaining itself [in humans] in the Middle East then it will show up around the rest of the world. It's just a matter of time.”

How then can we take precautions against an enemy that can arrive unannounced on our doorstep at any time? It is a question that was answered in part a decade ago when SARS, a distant relative of NCoV, first began to spread through China.

That epidemic spurred changes in the way nations work together to fight disease and led to revisions of International Health Regulations, according to Ars Technica. Increased reporting and surveillance are among the reasons scientists have so much to work with during this outbreak.

“Partly because of the way the field has developed post-SARS, we've been able to get onto this virus very early,” said Mike Skinner, an expert on coronaviruses told Reuters. “We know what it looks like, we know what family it's from and we have its complete gene sequence.”

Still, there are a lot of things health professionals don’t know, and there’s indication that some countries are less forthcoming than others. In this case, experts wonder if Saudi Arabia might be holding its NCoV cards a little too close to the vest.

Although the Saudi government has denied that it’s withholding any information, there has been speculation that the country might be trying to suppress an epidemic scare in the face of a large upcoming tourism event. Lending credibility to that theory are claims by the original reporting physician that he was dismissed for logging the new virus in the proMED infectious disease database.

“They didn't like that this appeared on proMED,” virologist Ali Mohamed Zaki, told the Guardian. “They forced the hospital to terminate my contract. “I was obliged to leave my work because of this, but it was my duty. This is a serious virus.” Unfortunately, according to the Ars Technica report (which was based on a report in Science that is behind a paywall), Saudi Arabia is not necessarily an outlier in the non-reporting arena.

“Challenges exist today,” writes Allie Wilkinson. “National and local capacities called for in the regulations are still not up to standards, national legal arrangements are not always consistent with international laws, and member states still worry about maintaining their reputations when divulging information about outbreaks.”

That means that as far as we’ve come, there are still chinks in our defenses and wide world in which disease can make its home. And regardless of a wealth of reporting or a dearth of it, scientists still fight the same battle with each new viral outbreak.

"What we know really concerns me,” Osterholm said. “But what we don't know really scares me.”