SK schools shut as 5 more MERS cases reported
Print Edition
SOUTH Korean President Park Geun-hye said yesterday that everything must be done to stop the current Middle East Respiratory Syndrome outbreak as fear of the disease shut hundreds of schools and led to corporate giant Samsung calling off a staff conference.
Five more MERS cases were confirmed yesterday taking to 30 the number infected in South Korea since the outbreak began there two weeks ago.
Two people have died, fuelling fear in the country with the most cases outside the Middle East, where the disease first appeared.
While there has been no sustained human-to-human transmission, the nightmare scenario is that the virus might spread rapidly, as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) did in 2002-2003 killing about 800 people around the world.
MERS was first identified in humans in 2012 and is caused by a coronavirus from the same family as the one that triggered SARS. But MERS has a much higher death rate at 38 percent, according to World Health Organization figures.
The WHO puts the total number of MERS cases globally at 1,161, with at least 436 related deaths, the vast majority in the Middle East. There is no cure or vaccine.
“There are a lot people worried about the situation,” Park told an emergency meeting of ministers and top officials. “Everything must be done to stop any further spread.”
More than 200 schools were shut yesterday, most of them in the province of Gyeonggi, around Seoul, where the first death occurred on Monday.
South Korea has quarantined or isolated about 1,300 people for possible MERS infection.
A spokesman for Samsung Group, South Korea’s top conglomerate, said an orientation conference for new staff scheduled for this week has been postponed in accordance with government instructions on public safety.
Though the WHO has not recommended trade or travel restrictions, South Korean border control authorities have put a ban on overseas travel for people isolated for possible infection, a health ministry official said.
China last week reported its first MERS case, that of a South Korean man who tested positive after travelling to China on a business trip against his doctor’s advice.
Of the five new cases, four had been in the same hospital as the first patient, a 68-year-old man who had been on a trip to the Middle East. The other, a 60-year-old man, caught it from another infected person.
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