Infectious diseases

Name: MERS (Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome)

Year: 2012, 2015, 2018

Infected: 2519

Dead: 866

The Middle East Coronavirus Respiratory Syndrome epidemic, which erupted in 2012 in Saudi Arabia, was the second coronavirus epidemic in 10 years. The vector of the pathogen are the dromedaries, although the mechanism of transmission from these to humans is not yet clear.

The most common symptoms are fever, cough, shortness of breath and myalgia; some patients also experience diarrhea, vomiting and abdominal pain. Although less contagious than other coronavirus diseases, it has a far higher lethality rate of 35% of the infected.

There have been three MERS epidemics so far: in addition to the aforementioned game from Saudi Arabia in 2012, another occurred in South Korea in 2015 and, still three years later, a third whose epicenter was again the Saudi Arabia.

On May 8, 2015, a few days before the outbreak in South Korea, WHO changed good practices for naming pathogens. These plan to avoid, among other things, geographical references, in order to prevent the stigmatization of ethnic and / or national groups.

Source: web