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Post by Admin on Jun 11, 2015 20:37:34 GMT
So far, the MERS experience there -- 10 dead, 122 infected, more than 3,800 people have been quarantined -- has interesting parallels to last year's Ebola panic. Both viruses have frighteningly high death rates (which can vary by treatment access but hover around 40%), and both lack any vaccine or definite treatment beyond supportive care and hard-to-access experimental protocols. A series of diagnostic and treatment errors swirled around South Korea's first MERS case, bearing a haunting similarity to our experience with the Ebola patient Thomas Eric Duncan, who left a Dallas hospital with the wrong diagnosis and useless antibiotics due in part to a failure of communication between doctors and nurses about his travel history. When Duncan returned to the hospital terminally ill, the Ebola virus he was carrying spread to two nurses caring for him. The first South Korean MERS case endured an even worse sequence of missed opportunities. The afflicted man sought care for his gradually worsening condition for nine days before he was ultimately diagnosed at Samsung Medical Center in Seoul. By that time, he had sought care at two clinics and spent three days in a smaller hospital 40 miles from Seoul.Whereas key details of Duncan's travel history never made its way to the emergency room physician in Dallas, the South Korean index of the patient's history was incomplete. Perhaps due to confusion, he told his doctors only about travel to Bahrain, where MERS hasn't yet been reported, but he had also traveled to the MERS endemic countries Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates. The World Health Organization said in a recent report that there is "no evidence of airborne transmission," and it advises routine contact precautions, and airborne precautions only when performing procedures on patients that may generate aerosols. Yet MERS has been isolated from the air before. In South Korea's index patient, the virus was found in the poorly ventilated hospital room's air conditioning unit, raising the likelihood that airborne transmission played a role in its rapid spread inside that hospital, where the most cases are reported.
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Post by Admin on Jun 13, 2015 20:33:53 GMT
Experts from the World Health Organization and South Korea on Saturday downplayed concerns about the MERS virus spreading further within the country, which recorded its 14th death and a dozen new infections, but said it was premature to declare the outbreak over. After a weeklong review of the outbreak of Middle East respiratory syndrome, the panel of experts told a news conference that there was no evidence to suggest the virus is spreading in the community. The outbreak in South Korea has so far been occurring only in hospitals, among patients, family members who visited them and medical staff treating them. The virus has spread at a pattern similar to previous outbreaks in the Middle East, and the sequencing studies of samples from South Korea show no signs that the virus has increased its ability to transmit between humans, said WHO Assistant Director Keiji Fukuda. While the infections seem to be stagnating, the South Korean government must continue to maintain strong control measures, such as thoroughly tracing patients' contacts and preventing suspected patients from traveling, because it's still early to declare the situation over, he said. The continued discovery of new cases has created an impression that the outbreak is getting bigger, but Fukuda noted that many of the cases being reported were of people who were infected in the past. New infections appear to be declining, which suggests that the government's control measures are having an impact, he said. "Now, because the outbreak has been large and is complex, more cases should be anticipated," he said. There has been widespread fear here of the poorly understood disease, which has no vaccine and had a mortality rate as high as 40 percent in previous outbreaks. There also had been growing criticism over failures by health workers and the government to initially recognize and quickly contain the disease.
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Post by Admin on Jun 15, 2015 20:38:02 GMT
South Korea Monday reported its 16th death in an expanding MERS outbreak, as President Park Geun-Hye called for efforts to shore up the economy against what she called "excessive" public alarm. Seoul also declared five new patients -- bringing the total number of cases including the deaths to 150 -- as fears grew over the impact of the outbreak on Asia's fourth-largest economy. More than 2,000 schools, which had been closed nationwide, reopened Monday as the outbreak showed signs of slowing, the education ministry said, adding 329 schools and 126 kindergartens were still shut. More than 100,000 foreigners have cancelled trips to South Korea since the beginning of June, vice tourism minister Kim Chong said, adding foreign currency earnings would dwindle by $2.3 billion if the number plunges by 50 percent. "Our tourism industry is faced with a very dire situation," he said, promising financial aid worth 72 billion won ($64 million) to help tourism-related businesses. About 14.2 million foreigners, or about 1.18 million people a month on average, visited the country last year. The five new patients -- aged from 39 to 84 -- were infected in hospitals in cities including Seoul and Daejeon, 140 kilometres (90 miles) south of the capital. Among them was a nurse who had performed CPR on an infected patient in Daejeon and a man who was infected at Samsung Medical Centre in Seoul after accompanying his sick mother there. She later died of MERS. The hospital is the epicentre of the outbreak and more than 70 patients, visitors and medical staff there have contracted the virus. The outbreak started on May 20 when a 68-year-old man was diagnosed after returning from a trip to Saudi Arabia. Since then more than 5,200 people have been placed in quarantine. Park's administration has suffered a storm of criticism for what critics describe as a slow and inadequate response to the crisis. A survey by polling agency Realmeter showed Monday that Park's job approval ratings had plummeted by 10 percentage points over the past two weeks to 34.6 percent.
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Post by Admin on Jun 19, 2015 20:25:15 GMT
The outbreak of Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) in South Korea — in which 154 people are known to have been infected so far, 19 of whom have died — is slowing down, experts say. But it might be several weeks before the outbreak can be declared officially over. Cases of MERS peaked on 1 June during a spate of cases at the Samsung Medical Center in Seoul, which had followed an initial wave centred in St Mary’s Hospital in Pyeongtaek. Researchers have been watching to see whether the Seoul hospital’s cases might in turn trigger a large third wave of infections. Now that 14 days — the maximum incubation period for the MERS coronavirus — have passed since 1 June, it seems that this is not happening. Seven of the ten hospitals in South Korea that initially had MERS cases have now gone 14 days with no new cases, meaning that the disease there has run its course. But in a setback, cautions Kim, the three others have since had potential new exposures to the virus. He is particularly concerned about the possible “reseeding” of the Samsung Medical Center — which has accounted for 75 cases — where several new cases occurred in early June, including an ambulance worker who worked for more than a week before being diagnosed, during which time the worker came into contact with many hospital patients. Any people who were infected would probably only begin to show symptoms over the next few days. “This week will be an important point to predict whether this MERS outbreak will end shortly or not,” notes Kim. Many people infected with MERS are known to have passed through other hospitals before they were diagnosed, says Keun Hwa Lee, a microbiologist at Jeju National University. Three hospitals alone were added to the list of facilities with confirmed cases since the weekend, pointing to the continuing threat of new outbreaks at other hospitals, Lee says. Meanwhile, the official count of facilities that have not had any cases, but which have to be monitored for possible further spread, has now risen to 72 — and many of these hospitals’ latest potential exposures to MERS were in the first 12 days of June. Control measures to prevent new outbreaks have been massively scaled up, however. As of this week, 161 hospitals, designated ‘national safe hospitals’, will begin treating anyone showing respiratory symptoms in special isolated zones, which are cut off from outpatient or emergency departments. South Korea's health ministry has also said that no patients with pneumonia will be admitted to intensive-care units without first being tested for MERS. Another uncertainty is whether further infections will develop in people who had been in contact with MERS-infected patients. By 16 June, 5,586 contacts of MERS cases had been traced and isolated for 14 days, with 3,505 people already given the all-clear. A week-long joint investigation of the outbreak by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Korean health ministry concluded on 13 June that its epidemiological pattern was similar to that of past MERS hospital-associated outbreaks in the Middle East. The investigation found that overcrowding in emergency departments and wards, and ‘doctor-shopping’ — the tendency of Koreans to seek second opinions at different medical facilities — probably contributed to MERS’s spread. The country's close-knit culture, in which family and friends tend to spend long periods with hospitalized patients, might also have been a factor.
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Post by Admin on Jun 23, 2015 20:19:35 GMT
As analysts scramble to gauge the likely economic impact of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome on the South Korean economy, internet searches for MERS point toward a downturn. As the chart below shows, Koreans have rushed to the web for information on the viral outbreak with an intensity that's eclipsed searches in the aftermath of the sinking of the Sewol ferry last year. When the Sewol overturned, killing around 300 people, mostly school children, the nation plunged into mourning and consumer spending slumped. Internet searches provided an early clue to the possible impact before more conventional economic data emerged. The disease, which was first reported in South Korea in May, has sickened 172 people and killed 27 people as of June 22 in the Asian nation after spreading from the Middle East. MERS, like the Sewol tragedy, is hitting the economy at a time when it had been showing signs of recovery in sentiment. It’s already prompted the central bank to pre-emptively cut borrowing costs to a record low, even before the emergence of hard data. MERS poses an “imminent risk” to consumption, Governor Lee Ju Yeol warned on June 11. MERS is also worrying for South Korea because it’s scaring away tourists from overseas, with more than 120,000 travelers canceling trips since June 1, according to the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism. Memories of the SARS epidemic in 2002 and 2003 resonate with prospective visitors from Hong Kong and mainland China, where hundreds were killed during that outbreak.
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