(MENAFN- Arab Times) Eight days after returning from a trip to the Middle East, a 68-year-old South Korean man developed a cough and fever. He visited four health facilities seeking treatment and inadvertently triggered the biggest outbreak of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) outside that region, and what is verging on national panic at home.
President Park Geun-hye said on Wednesday everything must be done to stop the outbreak that has infected 29 other people, and killed two of them, in South Korea. Hundreds of schools have locked their gates as the outbreak rekindled fears of a similar coronavirus that caused Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome in 2002, and killed about 800 people as it spread around the world.
The South Korean "index patient" was running a farm equipment company in Bahrain, according to a South Korean official, and had visited the region before returning on May 4. More than half of South Korea's infections have been traced to a hospital in Pyeongtaek city, 65 km (40 miles) southwest of Seoul, where the man shared a room with another patient. "The first patient was close to another person in the room and it appears that more infections took place as he went out of the room for checks, sneezing and coughing in the hall," said Kim Woo-joo, an infectious disease specialist advising the government. Others became infected at three of the four health facilities the man visited, authorities said. Officials have not identified the hospitals where MERS patients are being treated, but the Pyeongtaek facility has been shut and staff quarantined. A nurse there said there was a lack of knowledge about the virus when the man was hospitalised. Health officials have said hospital staff had not been aware of the man's Middle East trip.
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