The sky is falling ----oooooooohhhh !
Global Warming ------ oooooooohhhh !
My dog has fleas ------ oooooooohhhh !
| This one turns out to be serious. Sometimes the WHO gets it right. AoS |
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| Arabia | |
| WHO calls emergency meeting to respond to coronavirus outbreak | |
| 2013-06-22 | |
The coronavirus is casting a shadow over the annual Muslim pilgrimages to Saudi Arabia, where four new deaths were announced on Monday. The three-day meeting called by the World Health Organisation will look at developing guidelines for Ramadan. In October, more than two million people are expected to attend the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca. "Everyone is very aware of the fact that Ramadan begins next month and that there will be a large, large movement of people in a small crowded spaces," said Gregory Hartl, a spokesman for the WHO. "So the more we know about this virus before that starts the better." There are also concerns that tourists could bring the virus back to their home countries. It appears to have an incubation period of up to 12 days and a fatality rate of 60 per cent. Cases have also been found in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Tunisia and Jordan. Most were patients transferred home from the Middle East for treatment or people who had travelled to the region and became ill after they returned. Dr Jon Bible, a clinical scientist, who treated one of the three British cases last year, said: "You don't want to have this." Sufferers, he said, "are very close to death at all times. They are in respiratory distress at all times, it's like a very serious pneumonia". The relief for authorities is that it has not yet mutated so as to gain the ability to jump easily from person to person. Mr Hartl said: "We have been lucky it hasn't started to spread in any sustainable way between humans. We still have time, but we have to use that time to act." An international team of doctors who investigated nearly two dozen cases in eastern Saudi Arabia found the virus has some striking similarities to SARS, which killed 800 people around the world as it spread a global health panic in 2003. Unlike SARS, though, scientists remain baffled about the source of the new virus, which was first reported in April 2012. The symptoms of both are similar, with an initial fever and cough that may last for a few days before overpowering pneumonia develops. "To me, this felt a lot like SARS did," said Trish Perl, a senior hospital epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Medicine, who was part of the team. Their report was published in the New England Journal of Medicine. The team was alarmed to find MERS only spread within hospitals, even though some hospital patients were not close to the infected person. "In the right circumstances, the spread could be explosive," said Dr Perl. What is of particular concern is the high fatality rate of the virus. It has caused death in about 60 percent of patients so far, with 75 percent of cases in men and most in people with serious health conditions. There are currently no known treatments. | |
| Posted by:Steve White |
| #11 What gets it second. Slowly I turned.... |
| Posted by: Shipman 2013-06-22 17:50 |
| #10 Airborne, Harry. Correlate airflow ductwork venting with carrier and new infections. |
| Posted by: Skidmark 2013-06-22 17:27 |
| #9 Barbara, of course washing is Islamic, but sand can sometimes be used as a substitute for water. |
| Posted by: James 2013-06-22 16:23 |
| #8 Nothing a good milk and camel urine won't cure. |
| Posted by: swksvolFF 2013-06-22 12:26 |
| #7 Who gets it right? What gets it second. As for Prepare for the Saoodi medical system to be modestly over-stressed this Ramadan..., as long as the medical system wears a burka and only goes out in the company of a male relative... |
| Posted by: SteveS 2013-06-22 11:48 |
| #6 Everyone is very aware of the fact that Ramadan begins next month and that there will be a large, large movement of people in a small crowded spaces Dralm moves in mysterious ways. |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2013-06-22 10:33 |
| #5 Who gets it right? |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2013-06-22 10:17 |
| #4 Hmmm. Does anybody in the saudi hospital system actually wash their hands, or is that unislamic? We know they won't use hand sanitizer since it contains alcohol. |
| Posted by: Barbara 2013-06-22 10:15 |
| #3 The team was alarmed to find MERS only spread within hospitals, even though some hospital patients were not close to the infected person. Some lunatic with a syringe? |
| Posted by: Harry the Rasher1329 2013-06-22 09:45 |
| #2 The key question is how long before an infected person becomes infectious? |
| Posted by: phil_b 2013-06-22 01:48 |
| #1 WHO calls emergency meeting: The sky is falling ----oooooooohhhh ! Global Warming ------ oooooooohhhh ! My dog has fleas ------ oooooooohhhh !
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| Posted by: Shomp Glert7500 2013-06-22 00:44 |