Recombinomics Commentary 15:00
May 30, 2013
And it
comes to a Moroccan citizen who works in the Gulf state was entered Ibn Sina
University Hospital in Rabat. May 30, 2013
Moroccan network for the defense of health" for the first injury in Morocco Corona virus, and it comes Emirati citizen submitted to Morocco in the tour, entered the Sheikh Zayed Hospital in Rabat on Wednesday 29 May.
The above translations describe a MERS-CoV case in Rabat, Morocco (see map). Although one report indicates the case is an Emirati resident on tour in Morocco, while the other claims the case is a Moroccan who works in the Gulf, both reports strongly suggest the coronavirus was contracted in the Middle East and then transported to Morocco via commercial airline.The Morocco case follows a Tunisian cluster linked to Umrah travel in the Middle East (Qatar and Saudi Arabia), and a French cluster linked to a tour that included Dubai, UAE. These exports to Africa and Europe follow two large MERS-CoV hospital outbreaks in eastern Saudi Arabia.
The export of MERS-CoV from the Middle east to Europe (England and France) and Africa (Tunisia and Morocco) via infected patients has striking similarities to SARS-CoV spread in 2003, which also included outbreaks at hospitals involving health care workers, patients, and family contacts.
The high case fatality rate in Saudi Arabia, as well as the failure of Qatar, UAE, Bahrain, and Kuwait to report any MERS-CoV cases raises serious transparency issues and reporting failures.
The failures are not being adequately addressed by WHO, which relies on negative data from insensitive PCR tests to claim that MERS-CoV is not transmitting in communities in a sustained manner. This position is strongly refuted by the sequence data from MERS-CoV cases which originated in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Qatar, and UAE in patients diagnosed in The Netherlands, England, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and France.
WHO’s failure to enforce IHR regulations continues to be hazardous to the world’s health.