This Is What We Know About The MERS Virus So Far

South Korea is grappling with an outbreak of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome that has killed two and infected 30 people in total. In the same virus family as the common cold and SARS, the illness is a highly lethal respiratory disease that can also cause pneumonia and kidney failure before death. South Korea's Patient Zero is a businessman who had just traveled through Saudi Arabia, a country that has seen over 1,000 cases of the disease since it was first discovered back in 2012. Little is known about MERS, but in a review paper published Wednesday in the medical journal The Lancet, researchers Stanley Perlman of the University of Iowa and Alimuddin Zumla of University College London gathered all the published research on the mysterious disease to explain how it works and set priorities for future research. Here are some of the most important points for people in the U.S. who are concerned about the virus to know: MERS was first isolated in Saudi Arabia The first known MERS patient died of severe respiratory illness in 2012 in Jeddah. Since then, the World Health Organization has tallied 1,149 lab-confirmed MERS cases, with a 38 percent mortality rate as of May 31, 2015. Most of the cases are concentrated in Saudi Arabia, but some patients in far-flung parts of the world have also contracted the virus after coming into contact with another infected person. Researchers found antibodies to the MERS virus in some species of bats, as well as in the blood samples of came...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news