South Korea has gone 15 days without reporting a new MERS-CoV case, keeping the total at 186 cases, the country's Yonhap News Agency reported today. No deaths have been reported in 9 days, keeping the fatality count at 36.
The country will be considered free of the virus if it goes two incubation periods, a total of 28 days, without a new case.
Data from a hospital outbreak of Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) cases last spring suggest continuous healthcare-associated transmission for several months, a study today in Emerging Infectious Diseases noted.
Saudi Arabia's Ministry of Health (MOH) today announced one new MERS-CoV illness, involving a 93-year-old man from Hofuf, a town in the eastern part of the country that has reported family and hospital outbreaks over the past few months. His illness is the first to be reported in the town since Jun 25.
After going 9 straight days without a MERS-CoV case, Saudi Arabia today reported two.
In 2013 and 2014, high-containment laboratories at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) logged about a dozen power outages and airflow system failures that could have compromised safety, USA Today reported yesterday.
The problems were disclosed in a lab incident summary that the newspaper obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. They occurred between January 2013 and July 2014.
The Philippines patient, from Finland, also traveled to Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, and Singapore.
As the Philippines notes its 2nd case of 2015, Korea has 3 new cases and Saudi Arabia 1.
South Korea today reported its first confirmed MERS-CoV case in 5 days, in a nurse who works at Samsung Medical Center, the hardest-hit facility in the country's large healthcare-linked outbreak. The latest illness raises the total to 183.
For the fourth consecutive day, no new MERS-CoV cases were reported in South Korea, keeping the country's outbreak total at 182. Also, no other previously announced patients have died from their infections, holding the number of fatalities at 33, the Korea Herald reported.
For the third day in a row South Korea reported no new MERS-CoV cases, but its health ministry today reported one more death, involving an 81-year-old woman who had a stoke before she was diagnosed, the Korea Times reported today. The woman was exposed to the virus while at Samsung Medical Center in Seoul.
