Branswell: Most MERS cases going undetected, 'Slow moving epidemic underway': study.HT: Croft.
Via the Nanaimo Daily News, Helen Branswell of The Canadian Press
has a remarkable report: Most
MERS cases going undetected, 'Slow moving epidemic underway': study. Excerpt
(but read the whole article):
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A new analysis of MERS case data suggests a large number of infections are going undetected, with the researchers estimating that for each case that has been found, five to 10 may have been missed.
The scientific paper, from European researchers, further suggests that transmission of the MERS virus is occurring at a rate close to the threshold where it would be considered able to pass from person to person in a sustained manner.
In fact, the authors say based on the available evidence they cannot rule out the possibility that person-to-person spread is the main mode of transmission of the virus at this point. The other option, they say, is that the virus is spreading via a combination of animal-to-person and then person-to-person transfer.
"We conclude that a slow growing epidemic is underway, but current epidemiological data do not allow us to determine whether transmission is self-sustaining in man," they write in the article, published Wednesday in the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases.
The scientists are from Imperial College London, the University of Edinburgh and the Institut Pasteur in Paris. The work was done with funding from Britain's Medical Research Council, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and other agencies.
To date there have been roughly 155 confirmed MERS cases and at least 65 of those infections have ended in death. All the cases trace back to infections in a handful of countries on the Arabian Peninsula: Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Oman.
Neil Ferguson, from Imperial College's MRC Centre for Outbreak Analysis and Modelling, said that while publicly available data are spotty, calculations based on what is known support the argument that only a small proportion of cases are coming to light.
"At the very least there probably have been double that number of infections," Ferguson said in an interview.
"But it's considerably more likely in my view that we've had maybe five to 10 times more human infections than that. And symptomatic human infections, I would say."
He stressed that he and his co-authors are not suggesting that the MERS-affected countries are hiding cases, just that the way they are looking for them is not capturing the full scope of the outbreak.
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