More camel mentions among MERS-CoV cases...

Click on image to enlarge.

Special thanks to Professor Andrew Rambaut ([4]; @arambaut) for keeping such great track of the number of human cases in which camels has been mentioned.
Also thanks to Prof Rambaut and Ellen Knickmeyer  (@EllenKnickMeyer) for putting up with my stupid questions.

The current tally is now 11 human cases with a link to camels; 3 more than my earlier post on this topic.

The charts still show that cases outside of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) are proportionately more likely to identify human contact with camels than are MERS cases acquired within the KSA. 

The first case from Qatar with a camel link was from Sept-2012; from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) on Oct-2012; from Oman 20-Dec-2013. The very first (index) case of MERS-CoV to be announced to the world on Sept-2012, that from a 60-year old man living in Bisha in the KSA, also had contact with his 4 pet camels which we learned of in an article in the New York Times ([1] and later in an article late February 2014 [3]). 

I have not added the case of a Qatari male who owned a camel and goat farm [5], because the report in Eurosurveillance notes he claimed no direct contact with sick animals. I do wonder about contact with healthy or asymptomatic animals though. 

References...

1. New York Times article on Prof Memish et al's mBio paper.
   http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/22/health/mystery-virus-thats-killed-47-is-tied-to-bats-in-saudi-arabia.html
2. Prof Memish et al's mBio paper (does not mention camels though)
   http://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/19/11/13-1172_article.htm
3. Alagaili et al's paper noting camels were a contact of 60M index MERS case
   http://mbio.asm.org/content/5/2/e00884-14.full.pdf+html
4. Professor Andrew Rambaut's MERS-CoV case list
   http://epidemic.bio.ed.ac.uk/coronavirus_background
5. Eurosurveillance contact study of 45-year old male from Qatar (FluTracker's Case #6)
   http://www.eurosurveillance.org/ViewArticle.aspx?ArticleId=20406