Fifteen people have died after coming down with Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) in the past week, according to the Health Ministry of Saudi Arabia. There have been 47 new cases of the disease diagnosed in the last week, with all but two of those occurring in the capital city of Riyadh.
That raises the total number of cases that have occurred in Saudi Arabia to 1,165, with 64 people receiving treatment and 603 people fully recovered. The mortality rate for MERS is about 40%. The Saudi Health Ministry's most recent figures show that 498 people have died in Saudi Arabia after contracting the virus since it was first identified in 2012.
The MERS virus belongs to the group of viruses known as coronaviruses. The disease was first identified in Saudi Arabia in 2012 and most cases have occurred on the Arabian Peninsula, which includes Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman. The disease can be transmitted from person to person, but usually only through close contact.
Because the disease requires close contact, the risk of global spread of MERS is thought to be low. However, an outbreak in South Korea occurred earlier this year after an infected traveler returned from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain. In that outbreak, 184 people became ill and 19 people died. More than 6,500 South Koreans had to be quarantined before the outbreak ended.
In the United States, there have been two cases of MERS, both in people who traveled to the Middle East.
MERS causes symptoms such as fever, breathing problems, pneumonia, diarrhea, and kidney failure. However, it appears that some people can carry the virus but have no symptoms. The virus has an incubation period of about 5 days. The original source of the virus may have been camels, but a variant on MERS (MERS-CoV) was found in bats.