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Middle East Respiratory Syndrome: What We Learned from the 2015 Outbreak in the Republic of Korea

Overview
Journal Korean J Intern Med
Specialty General Medicine
Date 2018 Mar 7
PMID 29506344
Citations 110
Authors
Myoung-Don Oh
Wan Beom Park
Sang-Won Park
Pyoeng Gyun Choe
Ji Hwan Bang
Kyoung-Ho Song
Eu Suk Kim
Hong Bin Kim
Nam Joong Kim
Affiliations
Soon will be listed here.
Abstract

Middle East Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) was first isolated from a patient with severe pneumonia in 2012. The 2015 Korea outbreak of MERSCoV involved 186 cases, including 38 fatalities. A total of 83% of transmission events were due to five superspreaders, and 44% of the 186 MERS cases were the patients who had been exposed in nosocomial transmission at 16 hospitals. The epidemic lasted for 2 months and the government quarantined 16,993 individuals for 14 days to control the outbreak. This outbreak provides a unique opportunity to fill the gap in our knowledge of MERS-CoV infection. Therefore, in this paper, we review the literature on epidemiology, virology, clinical features, and prevention of MERS-CoV, which were acquired from the 2015 Korea outbreak of MERSCoV.

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