MERS- Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome, is a highly contagious and deadly respiratory disease, which has steadily been spreading its claws across Asia.
Outside of the Middle East, South Korea has become the most prolific victim of the syndrome, with 186 identified cases, out of which nearly 40 ended in fatalities.
But, the shock came when a study revealed that the disease, which has a mortality rate of 30-40 %, was spread by 1 single patient to over 82 people. The circumstance resulted from one infected person in an overcrowded emergency room in the Doo Ryeon Chung and Yae-Jean Kim of Samsung Medical Center, in the year 2015.
The episode goes as follows:
1) The infection was 1st brought to South Korea by a 68-year old man, who is being called as “patient 1”, who had travelled across the Middle East, in the Spring of 2015, to Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
2) He was soon correctly diagnosed, and put in an isolated ward. But, what the doctors did not know then was that he had already infected several other people before being shifted.
3) One of the people to catch the infection was a 35 year old man, being tagged as “patient 14”, who shared a ward with “patient 1”, and ended up spreading the virus through the facility’s emergency room.
4) According to the researchers, nearly 1600 people were exposed to “patient 14”.
5) Out of these 1600, 82 people contracted the disease.
6) Out of the 82 infected persons, 33 were other patients in the ward, 8 were health care staff, and 41 were visitors.
According to the study, it has been established, that patient staying in the same zone of the emergency ward as a MERS infections were at a 20 % chance of getting infected themselves.
The study was published in the medical journal- The Lancet, and it is the first scientific investigation to document the spread of the MERS virus through a hospital.