A 44-year-old South Korean man in China tested positive for Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) in the nation’s first confirmed case, officials said on Friday, adding that they had not found any symptoms in 38 people who had been in close contact with him.
Health authorities in the southern China’s Guangdong Province said that it was likely the disease would spread as the man had taken a bus, crossed a busy border checkpoint from Hong Kong and stayed in a hotel before being hospitalized.
“As we have said before, the possibility of MERS transferring into Guangdong is very high,” a Guangdong Provincial Center for Disease Control official told reporters. “In theory, it is possible to have a second case.”
Photo: Reuters
However, 38 people found to have come into contact with the man had not tested positive, he added.
First identified in humans in 2012, MERS is caused by a coronavirus from the same family as the one that triggered China’s deadly 2003 SARS. There is no cure or vaccine.
“The virus appears to be circulating widely throughout the Arabian Peninsula,” the WHO said on its Web site. “All recent cases that have been reported outside the Middle East first developed infection in the Middle East.”
The WHO on Friday said that 10 people in South Korea were confirmed as having MERS, but there had been no sustained human-to-human spread. The UN agency said that it was not recommending screening of passengers, or that travel or trade restrictions be imposed on South Korea due to the outbreak.
“The virus is not behaving differently. It is direct transmission and not sustained human-to-human transmission. They are all related to the same case, who came traveling from the Middle East,” WHO spokesman Christian Lindmeier told a news conference in Geneva, Switzerland.
Later on Friday, the South Korean Ministry of Health said two more patients were confirmed to have been infected, both of whom had been in the same hospital ward as the initial confirmed cases, raising the total number to 12.
The patient in China, hospitalized in isolation in the southern city of Huizhou, had a fever, while a chest examination showed possible pneumonia, the Chinese National Health and Family Planning Commission said.
“We understand that he is in a stable condition and is being well cared for,” the WHO China office said in a statement.
The man, who is a son of another person who was confirmed last week to have been infected in South Korea, had traveled to Huizhou after first arriving in Hong Kong on Tuesday, South Korean and Chinese authorities said.
Hong Kong health authorities said that 29 people had been in close contact with the South Korean in Hong Kong, with 12, including three Koreans, being quarantined in a hospital.
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