New Coronavirus 'Eerily' Like SARS
By Michael Smith, North American Correspondent, MedPage Today
Reviewed by Robert Jasmer, MD; Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco
June 19, 2013
June 19, 2013
The novel coronavirus outbreak in the Middle East is eerily similar
to SARS, according to an expert who was part of a team studying a
cluster of cases in hospitals in Saudi Arabia.
"This feels like SARS, it really does," said Trish Perl, MD, of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
"The illness pattern, the incubation period -- there are a lot of eerie similarities," Perl told MedPage Today.
Perl was part of an international team, led by Ziad Memish, MD, of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center for Mass Gathering Medicine in Riyadh, that looked into a cluster of 23 cases in hospitals in the east of Saudi Arabia.
The bottom line, as they reported online in the New England Journal of Medicine, is that person-to-person transmission of the virus can take place in healthcare settings and can do so with "considerable morbidity."
The virus, now dubbed MERS-CoV, is related to the virus that caused the 2002-2003 SARS outbreak -- both are coronaviruses and both lead to severe respiratory illness.
One key difference, Perl and colleagues noted, is that -- at least in the cluster they investigated -- the fatality rate was 65%, markedly higher than the 8% or so seen in the SARS outbreak.
On the other hand, that rate may fall if a large number of milder cases is detected, they noted.
An outside expert, David Freedman, MD, of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, told MedPage Today that an open question has been whether MERS could spread within hospitals as easily as did SARS.
The current study, he said, shows "unequivocally" that it can.
The report comes as the World Health Organization is reporting a total of 64 laboratory-confirmed cases of infection with MERS-CoV, including 38 deaths.
Most reported cases have either occurred in the Middle East or have involved recent travel to the region. While cases have been seen as far away as England, most have been reported from Saudi Arabia -- 49 cases and 32 deaths.
[...]
"This feels like SARS, it really does," said Trish Perl, MD, of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
"The illness pattern, the incubation period -- there are a lot of eerie similarities," Perl told MedPage Today.
Perl was part of an international team, led by Ziad Memish, MD, of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center for Mass Gathering Medicine in Riyadh, that looked into a cluster of 23 cases in hospitals in the east of Saudi Arabia.
The bottom line, as they reported online in the New England Journal of Medicine, is that person-to-person transmission of the virus can take place in healthcare settings and can do so with "considerable morbidity."
The virus, now dubbed MERS-CoV, is related to the virus that caused the 2002-2003 SARS outbreak -- both are coronaviruses and both lead to severe respiratory illness.
One key difference, Perl and colleagues noted, is that -- at least in the cluster they investigated -- the fatality rate was 65%, markedly higher than the 8% or so seen in the SARS outbreak.
On the other hand, that rate may fall if a large number of milder cases is detected, they noted.
An outside expert, David Freedman, MD, of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, told MedPage Today that an open question has been whether MERS could spread within hospitals as easily as did SARS.
The current study, he said, shows "unequivocally" that it can.
The report comes as the World Health Organization is reporting a total of 64 laboratory-confirmed cases of infection with MERS-CoV, including 38 deaths.
Most reported cases have either occurred in the Middle East or have involved recent travel to the region. While cases have been seen as far away as England, most have been reported from Saudi Arabia -- 49 cases and 32 deaths.
[...]
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