Saudi Arabia's steady pace of Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) infections continued today, with the country's health ministry reporting six new cases and three deaths.
The new cases are all from areas that have recently reported other MERS infections, with two reports each from Riyadh, Jeddah, and Taif, according to an update from the Saudi Ministry of Health (MOH).
One of the patients is asymptomatic, three are in stable condition, one is critical, and one died from her illness yesterday. Four of them have underlying medical conditions.
Five of the patients are adults ranging in age from 28 to 80. The other patient is an 11-year-old boy who was hospitalized with a brain tumor on Jan 17 and developed respiratory symptoms on May 14.
Only one patient—a 35-year-old woman who was first hospitalized in Mecca, then transferred to a facility in Jeddah—was reported to have had contact with another MERS patient. Healthcare-related exposure or contact with camels or animal environments wasn't noted for any of the patients.
Respiratory illness onsets range from Apr 28 to May 14, and, excluding the boy with the brain tumor, hospital admission dates—listed for four of the other patients—range from May 10 to May 15.
One death was reported among today's six new cases, that of a 67-year-old woman from Taif who had underlying conditions. On Apr 28 she started having a fever and breathing difficulty and fainted. She was hospitalized on May 12 and died yesterday.
The two other deaths occurred in previously reported patients, a 53-year-old woman from Jeddah whose illness was reported on May 14 and who died yesterday, and a 57-year-old woman from Riyadh whose infection was reported on May 5 and who died today.
The new infections and deaths lift Saudi Arabia's MERS tally to 520 cases and 163 deaths.
ECDC weighs in on numbers, trends
Before Saudi Arabia's case announcement today, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) put the global MERS outbreak total at 621 cases, 188 of them fatal. It said that, based on those numbers, the case fatality ratio is 30%.
It noted that 414 of the cases, 84% of them in Saudi Arabia, were reported in an ongoing surge of infections in April and May. For comparison, the ECDC said between March 2013 and March 2014, an average of 15 new MERS cases were reported each month.
Most cases have been reported from the Middle East or are directly linked to a primary case infected in the region, the ECDC said. Though the risk of more imported cases is ongoing, it said the risk of secondary transmission in the European Union is still low.
Respiratory sampling yields
In research developments, an analysis of clinical samples from 112 MERS patients in Saudi Arabia found that lower respiratory tract samples yielded higher viral loads and genome fractions when compared with nasopharyngeal swabs and sputum samples.
The team, from Saudi Arabia, Germany, and Britain, published its findings yesterday in the latest online edition of the Journal of Infectious Diseases.
See also:
May 16 Saudi MOH statement on 6 cases
Saudi MERS page with case count
May 16 ECDC epidemiologic update
May 15 J Infect Dis abstract
