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LONDON (AP) -- Two respiratory viruses in different parts of the world have captured the attention of global health officials - a novel coronavirus in the Middle East and a new bird flu spreading in China.

Last week, the coronavirus related to SARS spread to France, where one patient who probably caught the disease in Dubai infected his hospital roommate. Officials are now trying to track down everyone who went on a tour group holiday to Dubai with the first patient as well as all contacts of the second patient. Since it was first spotted last year, the new coronavirus has infected 34 people, killing 18 of them. Nearly all had some connection to the Middle East.

The World Health Organization, however, says there is no reason to think the virus is restricted to the Middle East and has advised health officials worldwide to closely monitor any unusual respiratory cases.

At the same time, a new bird flu strain, H7N9, has been infecting people in China since at least March, causing 32 deaths out of 131 known cases.

WHO, which is closely monitoring the viruses, says both have the potential to cause a pandemic - a global epidemic - if they evolve into a form easily spread between people. Here's a crash course in what we know so far about them:

Q: How are humans getting infected by the new coronavirus?

A: Scientists don't exactly know. There is some suggestion the disease is jumping directly from animals like camels or goats to humans, but officials are also considering other sources, like a common environmental exposure. The new coronavirus is most closely related to a bat virus, but it's possible that bats are transmitting the disease via another source before humans catch it.

Q: Can the new coronavirus be spread from human to human?

A: In some circumstances, yes. There have been clusters of the disease in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Britain and now France, where the virus has spread from person-to-person. Most of those infected were in very close contact, such as people taking care of a sick family member or health workers treating patients. There is no evidence the virus is spreading easily between people and all cases of human-to-human transmission have been limited so far.

Q: How are people catching the bird flu H7N9?

A: Some studies suggest the new bird flu is jumping directly to people from poultry at live bird markets. Cases have slowed down since Chinese authorities began shutting down such markets. But it's unclear exactly what kind of exposure is needed for humans to catch the virus and very few animals have tested positive for it. Unlike the last bird flu strain to cause global concern, H5N1, the new strain doesn't appear to make birds sick and may be spreading silently in poultry populations.

Q: What precautions can people take against these new viruses?

A: WHO is not advising people to avoid traveling to the Middle East or China but is urging people to practice good personal hygiene like regular hand-washing. "Until we know how and where humans are contracting these two diseases, we cannot control them," said Gregory Hartl, WHO spokesman.

Q: Which virus should we be more worried about?

A: It's impossible to know. "We really don't want to play the game of predicting which virus will be more deadly than the other," Hartl said. At the moment, both are worrisome since so little is known about how they are infecting humans and both appear to cause severe disease. "Any virus that has the ability to develop the capacity to spread from human to human is of great concern to WHO," he said.

© 2013 THE ASSOCIATED PRESS. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. THIS MATERIAL MAY NOT BE PUBLISHED, BROADCAST, REWRITTEN OR REDISTRIBUTED. Learn more about our PRIVACY POLICY and TERMS OF USE.

ST. LOUIS (AP) -- Jaime Garcia got rocked again by Colorado and fell well short of giving the St. Louis Cardinals three straight pitching gems.

"I made a couple mistakes and paid the consequences," Garcia said after allowing two homers that accounted for five runs in an 8-2 loss to the Rockies on Sunday. "Those guys had been doing an unbelievable job and you want to be able to continue a good thing."

Jorge De La Rosa held the Cardinals hitless into the seventh inning and Troy Tulowitzki's three-run homer ended Colorado's scoreless streak at 28 innings.

De La Rosa did not give up a hit until David Freese's two-out single in the seventh, answering a pair of outstanding performances by St. Louis starters Shelby Miller and Adam Wainwright over the weekend.

"Jaime definitely had a couple of pretty tough acts to follow," manager Mike Matheny said. "We know this is a good-hitting team, we know they're capable of jumping on you and putting up a lot of runs in a hurry. It happened today."

Garcia (4-2) had won three straight starts with a 1.25 ERA and no homers allowed in that stretch of 21 2-3 innings before running into the Rockies. He gave up five runs over six innings and fell to 0-3 with a 10.53 ERA - his highest against any opponent - in four starts against Colorado.

The left-hander entered as the career ERA leader at 8-year-old Busch Stadium at 2.41 but was undone by a changeup that stayed up in the zone against Tulowitzki in the third and a hanging curveball against Charlie Blackmon, who struck out in his first two at-bats, that went for a two-run homer in the sixth.

The Rockies and Marlins are the only National League teams Garcia hasn't beaten.

"How many starts have I made against them? Today was my fourth one?" Garcia said. "Obviously, they have a really good lineup, but I don't think about those things."

Garcia gave up just two homers in his first seven starts and entered with a 2.25 ERA overall.

Jordan Pacheco doubled with one out in the first to stop a 34-inning drought since Colorado's last extra-base hit, according to STATS. The Rockies finished with five extra-base hits, including a two-run double by pinch-hitter Reid Brignac off Carlos Martinez in the eighth.

The Rockies snapped a four-game skid and finished with 11 hits after totaling three in consecutive shutout losses to Miller and Wainwright.

Nolan Arenado, who singled with one out in the eighth to break up Wainwright's no-hit bid Saturday, was among four Rockies with two hits apiece.

The Cardinals lost for just the second time in 11 games. Matt Adams' RBI single off Matt Belisle in a two-run ninth, one of three hits by pinch-hitters, ended Colorado's shutout bid.

De La Rosa (4-3) struck out seven and allowed two hits in seven innings, baffling the Cardinals until Freese singled sharply to right off the glove of a diving Pacheco at first base. Jon Jay followed with a double. De La Rosa finished his longest outing of the season, and his best showing on the road by far, by getting Pete Kozma on a lineout to first.

De La Rosa entered 1-3 with a 5.13 ERA on the road and 2-0 at home with 12 scoreless innings. This was the fourth time he worked six or more scoreless innings.

Tulowitzki's eighth homer stopped the Rockies' scoreless streak two innings shy of the team record. They went 30 innings without a run from Sept. 30 to Oct. 3, 2010, according to STATS.

The Rockies entered the weekend with the top offense in the National League and still led with a .266 batting average going into the finale of the three-game series. Tulowitzki was 0 for 6 in the first two games with five strikeouts and Carlos Gonzalez had been hitless in 15 at-bats before finishing with two singles and a walk.

Blackmon batted eighth after being called up earlier in the day to replace Michael Cuddyer, placed on the 15-day disabled list with a neck injury. He got unexpected cheers after hitting his fourth career homer - he was introduced in his first at-bat as a player making his major league debut.

Colorado had five hits in the first three innings after totaling three and going 40 consecutive at-bats without a hit the previous two days. The Rockies have never been shut out three straight times.

The Cardinals' streak of retiring 40 straight batters is tied for the second-longest in the majors since 1974, two shy of the record set by the Seattle Mariners from Aug. 14-17 last year, with Felix Hernandez throwing a perfect game on Aug. 15. Rangers pitchers retired 40 in a row in 1996.

NOTES: Gonzalez had two singles and a walk and is 6 for 12 against Garcia. ... Cardinals pitchers had a 2.02 ERA over the previous 10 games. ... Cardinals C Yadier Molina was 0 for 3, ending an 11-game hitting streak. He had five hits in the first two games of the series.

© 2013 THE ASSOCIATED PRESS. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. THIS MATERIAL MAY NOT BE PUBLISHED, BROADCAST, REWRITTEN OR REDISTRIBUTED. Learn more about our PRIVACY POLICY and TERMS OF USE.

CLEVELAND (AP) — Three women found alive after a decade in captivity endured lonely, dark lives inside a dingy home where they were raped and allowed outside only a handful of times in disguises while walking to a garage steps away, investigators say.

The 52-year-old former school bus driver accused of kidnapping and raping the women will make his first public appearance in court Thursday after emerging as the lone suspect.

While many questions remain about how Ariel Castro maintained such tight control over the women for so many years before one of them made a daring escape Monday, the horrors they suffered are beginning to come to light.

Police say the women were apparently bound by ropes and chains at times and were kept in different rooms. They suffered prolonged sexual and psychological abuse and had miscarriages, according to a city official briefed on the case.

Castro has been charged with four counts of kidnapping — covering the captives and the daughter born to one of them — and three counts of rape, against all three women.

The women and Castro have given lengthy statements to police that have helped build their case, said Deputy Police Chief Ed Tomba.

None of the women, though, gave them any indication that Castro's two older brothers, who've been in custody since Monday, were involved, Tomba said. Prosecutors brought no charges against the brothers, citing a lack of evidence.

"Ariel kept everyone at a distance," Tomba said.

One thing that remains a mystery, he said, is how the women were kept in the house so long.

"As far as the circumstances inside the home and the control he may have had over those girls ... I think that's going to take us a long time to figure that out," he said.

The women, now in their 20s and 30s, vanished separately between 2002 and 2004. At the time, they were 14, 16 and 20 years old.

At a news conference, authorities would not discuss the circumstances of their kidnapping and captivity.

City Councilman Brian Cummins earlier said: "We know that the victims have confirmed miscarriages, but with who, how many and what conditions we don't know."

"It sounds pretty gruesome," he added.

They never saw a chance to escape over the last 10 years until this week when Amanda Berry broke through a door and ran to freedom, alerting police who rescued the other two women while Castro was away from the house.

In newly released police audio tapes, a 911 dispatcher notifies officers on Monday that she's just spoken to a woman who "says her name is Amanda Berry and that she had been kidnapped 10 years ago."

An officer on the recorded call says, "This might be for real."

After police arrive at the house, women can be heard crying in the background. Then an officer tells the dispatcher: "We found 'em. We found 'em."

Tomba said of Berry, "Something must have clicked and she saw an opportunity and she took that opportunity."

He said the women could remember being outside only twice during their entire time in captivity. "We were told they left the house and went into the garage in disguise," he said.

Also in the house was Berry's 6-year-old daughter. A paternity test on Castro was being done to establish whether he fathered the child.

While prosecutors announced charges against Castro, federal agents searched a vacant house near where the women had been held. Officials would only say their search was an attempt to get evidence in the case against Castro, but they refused to say what they found or what led them there.

Castro was in custody and couldn't be reached for comment. A brother-in-law has said the family was shocked after hearing about the women at the home.

Few people in Cleveland, outside the families of the women, thought there was any chance they were still alive.

Berry, 27, and Gina DeJesus, who is in her early 20s, were welcomed home Wednesday by jubilant crowds of loved ones and neighbors with balloons and banners. Family members hustled them inside, past hundreds of reporters and onlookers.

Neither woman spoke.

"This is the best Mother's Day I could ever have," said Nancy Ruiz, Gina's mother. She said she hugged her daughter and didn't want to let go.

Ruiz said she spent time with all three women after they were rescued. "There's no word to describe the beauty of just seeing them," she said.

DeJesus' father pumped his fist after arriving home with his daughter, and urged people across the country to watch over the children in their neighborhoods — including other people's kids.

"Too many kids these days come up missing, and we always ask this question: How come I didn't see what happened to that kid? Why? Because we chose not to," he said.

The third captive, Michelle Knight, 32, was reported in good condition at Metro Health Medical Center, which a day earlier had reported that all three victims had been released. There was no immediate explanation from the hospital.

The Associated Press does not usually identify people who may be victims of sexual assault, but the names of the women were widely circulated by their families, friends and law enforcement authorities for years during their disappearance.

Castro was accused of twice breaking the nose of his children's mother, knocking out a tooth, dislocating each shoulder and threatening to kill her and her daughters, according to a 2005 domestic-violence filing in Cuyahoga County Domestic Relations Court.

The filing for a protective order by Grimilda Figueroa also said that Castro frequently abducted her daughters and kept them from her. Figueroa died in April 2012 after a battle with cancer.

Figueroa's father, Ismail Figueroa, said Wednesday that Castro would regularly lock his daughter inside a second-floor apartment in the house where they lived when they were first together.

Later, when they moved a few blocks to the house Castro purchased — the house from which, years later, the women would escape — he kept a close eye on her and refused to let people come inside to visit her or even let her pick up their children from school, said Angel Villanueva, who is married to Grimilda Figueroa's sister.

Grimilda was "not allowed to go nowhere," said Villanueva. No matter where she wanted to go, "it had to be with him."

___ Associated Press writers Andrew Welsh-Huggins and Mike Householder and freelance reporter John Coyne in Cleveland; Mitch Stacy in Columbus; Dan Sewell in Cincinnati; John Seewer in Toledo; and news researchers Rhonda Shafner and Jennifer Farrar in New York contributed to this report.