Third MERS patient dies in South Korea
Print Edition
SOUTH Korea yesterday confirmed that a man who died on Wednesday night had tested positive for MERS, the third fatality in an outbreak that is fueling growing alarm in the country.
The 82-year old, in hospital with asthma and bacterial pneumonia, had shared a room with others infected with the virus, the health ministry said in a statement.
He was South Korea’s 36th confirmed case of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome.
More than 1,100 of the country’s schools were closed yesterday, while North Korea called for checks on workers crossing the border.
South Korean President Park Geun-hye has demanded that everything be done to halt the outbreak, which began two weeks ago, brought into the country by a man returning from a business trip to the Middle East.
MERS first appeared in 2012 in the Middle East, where most of the 442 fatalities to date have been.
About 1,600 people have been quarantined in South Korea, most of them at home but some in medical institutions, a health ministry official said.
Among the five other new South Korean cases reported yesterday were two health workers who had treated infected patients.
“We are in a war,” said an official at a health center in Seoul’s wealthy Gangnam district, where there was some panic when medical workers in protection suits were spotted near a hotel. The official said a Middle Eastern guest had fallen ill and was later quarantined in hospital.
MERS is caused by a coronavirus from the same family as that which caused SARS, or Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, which emerged in 2002-2003 and killed around 800 people worldwide.
MERS has a much higher death rate, of 38 percent, according to the World Health Organization, but also spreads far less swiftly than SARS from person to person.
North Korea has asked South Korea to provide heat-detecting cameras to monitor temperatures of workers travelling to the inter-Korean Kaesong Industrial Complex, just north of the border, a South Korean government official said.
South Korea lent North Korea three cameras to use at the complex during the recent Ebola scare, the official said.
The WHO has not recommended travel curbs so far, but about 7,000 people from China’s mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan had canceled trips to South Korea earlier this week because of the crisis, a spokesman for the Korea Tourism Organization said.
Japan said it was looking into possible quarantine measures for people arriving from South Korea.
China last week reported its first case, that of a South Korean man who tested positive after traveling to the country on a business trip.
Authorities have been criticized for being slow to respond to the initial spread of MERS in South Korea.
It took several days for the 68-year-old man returning from the Middle East to be diagnosed, during which time he infected people at health facilities where he sought treatment.
All of South Korea’s cases have been traced back to the man, who had visited Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the countries with the most MERS cases.
The man whose death was confirmed yesterday was the sixth person in the South Korean outbreak to get the virus through tertiary infection, officials said, meaning that he caught it from a patient infected by the original carrier.
All the other cases have been traced directly back to the first patient.
South Korea’s new Mers cases bring the total number globally to about 1,180, based on WHO figures.
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