MERS outbreak in South Korea 7 dead; 2,500 quarantined

Posted by Anup Baral June 08, 2015 :For the people who fought Toronto’s devastating SARS outbreak in 2003, the news out of South Korea right now sounds eerily familiar. A man infected with a new coronavirus for which there are no vaccines or drugs turns up in a hospital sick and infectious. It is days before he’s recognized as a carrier of the new disease and during that time he isn’t isolated. He infects a couple dozen people who, in turn, pass the disease to still more. The widening circle involves hospital patients, family members who visited them and health-care professionals who cared for them. Cases start popping up in other hospitals. The public gets spooked. Authorities order exposed people into quarantine as they struggle to get ahead of a fast moving outbreak. That could almost be a recitation of the early days of Toronto’s SARS outbreak. But South Korea is battling a cousin virus, Middle East respiratory syndrome or MERS.