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South Korea Mers infections rise to 50; one patient recovers from virus
PUBLISHED : Saturday, 06 June, 2015, 10:39am
UPDATED : Saturday, 06 June, 2015, 11:00am
Reuters in Seoul
South Korean President Park Geun-hye (right) talks to members of a medical team during her visit at the government-designated isolation ward at the National Medical Center in Seoul. She has urged officials to step up the fight against Mers. Photo: EPA
South Korea’s health ministry today reported nine more cases of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (Mers), raising the total to 50. One patient had recovered and became the first to be discharged from hospital.
The outbreak first reported on May 20 has claimed four lives and stirred public fear as the government was blamed for an ineffective initial response that allowed one man who had returned from Saudi Arabia to infect more than half the rest.
All nine new cases were traced to the initial patient, the health ministry said, calling them health care-associated infections. They included one health care worker at a hospital that treated an infected patient, it said.
There has been no sustained human-to-human transmission, but the worst case scenario is the virus changes and spreads rapidly, as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (Sars) did in 2002-2003 killing about 800 people around the world.
Separately, Beijing announced it had completed genome sequencing of samples from the South Korean Mers patient in a hospital in Huizhou in Guangdong. It reported that the virus had not mutated.
The sequencing was completed by the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention in cooperation with the Guangdong health department.
The patient, whose father and sister were also infected with Mers, had defied voluntary quarantine and travelled to mainland China via Hong Kong late last month.
Hong Kong's chief executive Leung Chun-ying said that planes flying into Hong Kong from South Korea would be taken to designated gates after touchdown where health inspectors would carry out checks as passengers disembarked.
Leung also urged the South Korean government to be more forthcoming with information about the spread of the virus.
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 per cent, according to World Health Organisation (WHO) figures.
South Korea’s new cases bring the total number globally to about 1,194, based on WHO data, with at least 443 related deaths.
With additional reporting from Staff Reporters
