Victims of SARS-like virus didn’t travel
RIYADH – Five Saudis who died after contracting a new SARS-like virus last week had not traveled abroad, a health ministry official said on Saturday.
“After questioning relatives, it turned out that none of these people had been abroad before being infected,” Dr. Ziad Mimish, Undersecretary of Ministry of Health for Public Health, told AFP.
The outbreak occurred in Al-Ahsaa, which is near Bahrain and Qatar.
The original seven cases in this group all reportedly had “multiple comorbidities.” A comorbidity is medical-speak for a disease or condition. The ages of the initial seven cases ranged from 24 to 94, though most were in their 50s.
The ministry was working closely with the World Health Organization (WHO) over cases registered in Saudi Arabia but did not need help from foreign medical teams, Mimish said.
A system was put in place across the Kingdom to detect suspected cases and to monitor the condition of medics in contact with the patients, he added.
The health ministry said it is taking “all precautionary measures for persons who have been in contact with the infected people... and has taken samples from them to examine if they are infected.”
The ministry has started conducting surveillance search of all persons who mingled with the patients, whether family members or acquaintances, and testing their samples, to determine if any of them has any sign of contracting the virus.
The ministry said that its announcement comes as part of its transparency policy toward public regarding all the health matters that might affect them.
The WHO reported on Friday that three new cases of the virus were detected in Saudi Arabia, bringing to 27 the global total of confirmed cases, including 16 deaths.
The mysterious virus has been deadliest in Saudi Arabia, and the other cases were reported in Jordan, Germany and Britain.
In Geneva, a spokesman for the World Health Organization would not comment on why so many of the cases have occurred in the Kingdom.
“We have received a formal notification from the Saudis about these cases,” spokesman Glenn Thomas told AFP.
When asked if the WHO is planning to issue a travel warning for Saudi Arabia, he said this was “unlikely” since “there has been no change in the risk assessment.”
Coronaviruse causes most common colds and pneumonia, but are also to blame for unusual conditions such as SARS which killed more than 800 people when it swept out of China in 2003.
The new virus is different from SARS, in that it can cause rapid kidney failure.
Known as novel coronavirus or hCoV-EMC, the virus was first detected in mid-2012 and is a cousin of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) virus, which triggered a scare 10 years ago when it erupted in East Asia, leaping to humans from animal hosts.
hCoV-EMC stands for human coronavirus-Erasmus Medical Center, after the Dutch health institution that identified it. – Agencies http://www.saudigazette.com.sa/index.cfm?method=home.regcon&contentid=20130505164375
