South Korea struggled to contain an outbreak of Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) yesterday as health authorities announced three more cases, while China searched for 13 people who came into contact with the first person to enter the country with the virus, Chinese officials said.
South Korean authorities are considering a ban on overseas travel for the nearly 700 people isolated for possible infection after a 44-year-old man broke a voluntary house quarantine last week and flew to Hong Kong and then to China.
The man subsequently tested positive for MERS, China’s first confirmed case, setting off alarm bells as health officials traced his footsteps and tested dozens of people who had been in close contact with him.
Photo: AFP
THREE NEW CASES
The South Korean Ministry of Health and Welfare confirmed three more cases yesterday — bringing the number of infections to 18 in just over 10 days — but declined to identify the location of any of the cases.
All 18 have been linked to a 68-year-old man who returned from Bahrain via Qatar on May 20 and were either patients or visitors to the hospital where he was being treated.
The WHO put the total number of cases globally at 1,150 with at least 427 related deaths.
It said last week there had been no sustained human-to-human spread and that it was not recommending screening of passengers or that travel or trade restrictions be imposed on South Korea.
The European Center for Disease Prevention and Control listed South Korea’s 18 cases as the fourth-highest number of confirmed cases, after Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Jordan.
CRITICISM
South Korean public health authorities faced more criticism yesterday for failing to contain the spread of the virus after the initial case whose symptoms were first overlooked.
“We must find the reason for the high rate of transmission, unlike in the cases of other countries,” South Korean President Park Geun-hye told a meeting yesterday
Park also scolded health officials for their “insufficient” response to the outbreak.
Her remarks came after South Korean health officials were criticized for allowing the infected man to travel overseas despite warnings from physicians.
In China, 11 people who traveled on a bus with the 44-year-old man are among the 13 who are being sought, health officials in Guangdong Province said, adding that 64 others had been quarantined.
The 44-year-old is quarantined and “his vital signs are stable, and his heart rate and blood pressure normal,” the China Daily newspaper reported yesterday.
None of those who have been quarantined are “appearing unwell,” Guangdong’s Health and Family Planning Commission said late on Sunday in an online post. “[We] still need to get 13 people, among them 11 bus passengers,” the post on Sina Weibo said.
It added that passenger records were unavailable.
MERS can cause symptoms ranging from flu-like aches and pains to pneumonia and kidney failure.
It is considered a deadlier, but less infectious, cousin of SARS, which killed hundreds of people when it appeared in Asia in 2003.
In Hong Kong, 18 people — who sat near him on the flight from Seoul — have been quarantined, the city’s Centre for Health Protection has said.
“The possibility of widespread human-to-human infections is remote,” China Daily added, paraphrasing a director in charge of infectious disease prevention at the Guangdong Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
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