(MENAFN- QNA) South Korea reported five additional cases of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) on Thursday, raising the number of people diagnosed with the potentially deadly disease to 35.
Two of the five people newly diagnosed with MERS are staff members of two hospitals that had treated patients prior to their diagnosis, according to the South Korean Ministry of Health and Welfare. Every patient is now isolated and being treated at state-designated hospitals.
As of Wednesday, some 1,300 other people were in isolation at undisclosed medical institutes or their homes for possible infection. The number has reached more than 1,600 as of Thursday, according to the health ministry. They are those who have come in close contact with any of the people diagnosed.
The number had remained below 100 at the beginning of the week as the government maintained no tertiary transmission of the disease had been reported throughout the world. Seoul confirmed such a case on Tuesday, then again on Wednesday in a 60-year-old man who had shared the same hospital room with a patient who was later diagnosed with MERS.
Tertiary infection means any of the 35 people diagnosed so far may transmit the disease that, until its first outbreak in South Korea on May 20, had a very high fatality rate of more than 40 percent globally. So far, South Korea has confirmed two MERS-related deaths.
As of Thursday, the disease showed a fatality rate of 5.7 percent in South Korea, the health ministry said. The ministry said it was conducting a DNA test of the MERS coronavirus to see whether there has been any mutation of the virus, making it easier to be transmitted.
The outcome of the test is due Friday at the earliest. The move comes as the number of people infected with the disease has been rising at an increasing rate since the country confirmed its first case on May 20 in a man who had traveled to the Middle East in mid-April and returned home in early May.
MERS is a viral respiratory illness that is fairly new to humans with only some 1,100 confirmed cases reported throughout the world since the first case was reported in Saudi Arabia in 2012. There currently is no vaccine or treatment for the disease.
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