South Korea MERS totals stable for more than 2 weeks
South Korea has gone 15 days without reporting a new MERS-CoV case, keeping the total at 186 cases, the country's Yonhap News Agency reported today. No deaths have been reported in 9 days, keeping the fatality count at 36.
The country will be considered free of the virus if it goes two incubation periods, a total of 28 days, without a new case.
Samsung Medical Center, which was the epicenter of the outbreak, resumed full operations today, Yonhap reported. On May 14 the facility shut down most of its services, because it, especially the emergency department, was the source of about half of the country's infections.
According to an update today from South Korea's Ministry of Health (MOH), 14 MERS-CoV Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus) patients are still being treated, 11 of them in stable condition and 3 listed as unstable. Twenty-two people are still in quarantine, with 16,671 having completed their 14-day isolation and monitoring period.
Jul 20 Yonhap News story
Jul 20 Korean MOH update
Elsewhere, Saudi Arabia has gone 4 days without reporting a new MERS-CoV case, but over the past 4 days the country has reported two deaths in previously announced cases, according to updates from Saudi Arabia's MOH. One was a 77-year-old man from Jeddah whose death was announced Jul 17, and the other a 56-year-old woman from Riyadh whose death was announced Jul 18. Both had pre-existing conditions.
So far Saudi Arabia has confirmed 1,048 MERS cases since June of 2012, 462 of them fatal. Six people are still being treated for their infections, and 580 have recovered from the disease.
Jul 17 Saudi MOH statement
Jul 18 Saudi MOH statement
Review notes avian flu, rabies top list of wildlife-livestock diseases
Avian flu and rabies lead the list of the most-studied pathogens at the wildlife-livestock interface, and media interest may largely drive research on such diseases, according to a large meta-analysis today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Australian, UK, and Italian experts considered more than 78,000 studies published from 1912 to 2013 before analyzing 15,998. They found that the number of publications per year involving diseases at the wild-domestic interface increased continuously, with a shift from parasitic diseases to viral diseases over time.
Ten diseases, most of which can spread to people, accounted for half of the published research: avian flu (covered in 9.9% of studies), rabies (9.4%), salmonellosis (6.2%), bovine tuberculosis (TB; 5.7%), trichinollosis (5.0%), Newcastle disease (4.8%), brucellosis (4.2%), leptospirosis (4.1%), echinococcosis (3.8%), and toxoplasmosis (3.4%).
One third of publications addressed diseases at the wildlife-cattle interface, 25% at the wildlife-poultry interface, and 18% at the wildlife-swine interface. When broken down by specific interface, the most frequently studied interfaces were between species that are closely related—such as wild ungulates and domestic ones—or that share the same habitat. The team found that the interface between wild birds and poultry was cited the most, with the relative importance of other interfaces varying by geographic region.
The researchers found that trends in publication on avian flu and bovine TB correlated strongly with media interest in and research funding of these diseases. "These examples show that investments have largely been proportionate to the perceptions of disease at the wildlife–livestock interface, rather than actual costs associated with, e.g., animal and human morbidity, livestock production losses, and conservation impacts," they wrote.
Jul 20 Proc Natl Acad Sci abstract