MERS: Mortality & Comorbidity - @maiamajumder Mens et Manus blog
# 8541
It has been a very busy weekend on the MERS Coronavirus front, and so a brief recap of recent events (with links) and some referrals to what others have been writing, to start your week off.
First, 26 new MERS cases were announced from Saudi Arabia (10 on Saturday and 16 on Sunday), with cases being reported now not only in Jeddah and Riyadh, but Mecca and Tabuk as well. The WHO also release a GAR update on 7 UAE MERS cases on Saturday.
On Friday night Egypt announced their first imported MERS case, and in response, on Sunday we saw Egypt Ramps Up MERS Surveillance At Local Ports. Meanwhile, as part of their response to the crisis, on Saturday the Saudi MOH Announced: Three Hospitals Assigned As MERS Treatment Centers.
The `big story’ has come from the lab of Dr. Christian Drosten, in Bonn Germany, who has very rapidly sequenced three early samples of the MERS virus from the Jeddah outbreak, and compared it to others collected over the past two years.
On Friday, we saw preliminary analysis of the `spike protein’ region, which found no major changes that would account for increased transmissibility. Yesterday, Dr. Drosten announced a more complete analysis which looked at the full genome (see Drosten: Jeddah MERS Sequences Show No Significant Changes).
While `good news’ – in that it suggests the virus has not `mutated’ - this leaves open the question as to why the MERS virus has suddenly taken flight – at least in a couple of areas of Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
For some insight into what all of this means, Dr. Ian Mackay penned a pair of blogs over the weekend exploring these results:
If this is what MERS-CoV detections look like with more testing...what is the "normal" community level of virus?? [UPDATED]
MERS-CoV genomes remain stable amid Jeddah outbreak cases... [UPDATED]
Overnight Andrew Rambaut, on his epidemic: Molecular Epidemiology and Evolution of Viral Pathogens website, took a look at the placement (and potential significance) of Drosten’s latest MERS sequences in the MERS phylogenetic tree in:
Initial hints about the origins of the April Jeddah MERS-CoV outbreak
Lastly, a referral to the growing body of work being produced by Maimuna (Maia) Majumder - an Engineering Systems PhD student at MIT, MPH & epidemiologist – whose website Mens et Manus is rapidly becoming the place to go for some of the most innovative MERS and infectious disease related graphics and commentary on the web.
Maia began uploading her graphics on FluTrackers over the weekend, and her work is a terrific addition to Flublogia. You can follow her on twitter @maiamajumder, and you’ll find a link to her site in my sidebar.
Highly recommended.
