Via CIDRAP, Robert Roos writes: Saudi Arabia reports 2 more MERS cases. Excerpt:
Saudi Arabia has confirmed two more Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) cases, one of them fatal, according to a translated statement from the health ministry today, while media reports said a patient in Qatar has died.
The Saudi health ministry said a 73-year-old woman in Riyadh is the latest citizen to die of the illness, according to a machine translation posted on the Avian Flu Diary blog by Michael Coston. It said she had several chronic diseases.
The other new case-patient is a 65-year-old male citizen from the Jawf region, who also has chronic diseases, the statement said. He was taken to Riyadh for treatment in an intensive care unit. No other details were provided. Jawf province is in northern Saudi Arabia and borders Jordan.
The health ministry's MERS-CoV page currently lists 129 cases and 54 deaths in Saudi Arabia.
The location of the case in Al-Jawf may be signficant. Last month, Shane Granger at Random Analytics posted a MERS infographic showing the provincial distribution of cases, with the northern provinces conspicuously lacking. However MERS may travel, its first (retroactive) identification was in April 2012 in Zarkqa, Jordan. So the proliferation of cases in southern Saudi Arabia and in the Gulf states seems oddly detached.
It seems more likely that the MERS virus is part of the general environment of the Middle East, and a serious surveillance program might find far more mild and asymptomatic cases across the region. It's a scandal that we still haven't identified a proximate source of any but the human-to-human cases.
