Hat tip to @makoto_au_japonAccording to a DNA report (a Mumbai-based, English broadsheet daily owned by Diligent media Corp in case you were wondering), the 40-year man from Mumbai is not positive for the MERS-CoV. He is also negative for "swine flu" (pick one)...what he is positive for is unclear but he is recovering.Just another insight into how often we don't know what...
Health infrastructure at the site of the suspect MERS case in Mumbai, India
Hat tip to @makoto_au_japon for bringing this article to the foreFacilities for patient isolation at the Kasturba hospital, Mumbai, where the 40M undergoing testing for (hopefully) a range of respiratory viruses including MERS-CoV, are less than ideal.A report on The Times of India notes poor bed separation, concern for healthcare workers (HCWs) dealing with the case (whatever respiratory virus they have)...
H5N1 did not transmit easily between humans in the wild...
Hat tip to @Laurie_Garrett and CIDRAPDespite wearing next to no personal protective equipment (5% of 419 contacts used a mask, face shield, gown or gloves) and coming into contact with sick or dead poultry (12% of contacts), 85/87 household members and 332 "less close" contacts of 23 influenza A(H5N1) virus cases did not show any significant sign of antibodies to the virus, a study published...
Suspected case of MERS-CoV in India...
A story at The Times of India describes a 40-year old male with fever and pneumonia who has been quarantined after returning to India from 35-days in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.The patient is responding well to oseltamivir medication which does not support a MERS-CoV infection, rather an influenza infection. 40M has already tested negative for influenza A(H1N1)...
Its probably not a MERS-CoV!
I commented on a news article from tweeted by @pandemic_News yesterday....@pandemic_news Woah!! There is a known FELINE coronavirus...that is not at all #MERS-CoV. See pink filled circles at http://t.co/vUEyD2FoaO� Ian M Mackay, PhD (@MackayIM) August 14, 2013 The article's headline had read MERS corona kills cat in the East. It seems to have been picked up some others overnight. I notice...
Prof Ziad A Memish: principal author of MERS-CoV data
Since the human cases of MERS-CoV started in 2012, the majority of publications describing signs and symptoms of disease, incubation periods, sites and routes of transmission clusters of infections have come from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and most of those have involved co-authorship, usually as senior author, by Prof Memish. He also commented on the initial ProMED posting from Prof Ali Mohamed...
4.8-million Umrah pilgrims free of MERS-CoV...?
According to an Arab News report, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia's (KSA) Health Minister Abdullah Al-Rabeeah, has said that 4,800,000 pilgrims visited to perform Umrah this year, and not one left having had a Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) infection. That certainly suggests that the virus is hard to catch and that its not transmitting...
Australia's NHMRC briefing to Grant Review Panellists...
The Australian government's peak medical research funding body, the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) has a webcast (like podcast but for all platforms and devices) of the briefing given to the multidisciplinary Grant Review Panellists (GRPs; 516 members this year) as they meet in Canberra this week to award this year's pot of money (Project grants were awarded $458 million...
3 in 50 mostly asymptomatic workers handling live poultry have H7N9 antibodies...
Earlier in the week Yang and colleagues, publishing in the Journal of Infectious Diseases, found that among 1570 people from Zhejiang province tested for antibodies towards influenza A(H7N9) virus, 25 of 396 (6.3%) poultry handlers from live poultry markets had antibodies detected. Only 9 (0.8%; statistically significantly fewer) of the 1129 community members showed signs...
H7N9 antibody study finds no sign of infection in contacts of Taiwan's only H7N9 case to date...
Hseih and colleagues describe, in the Journal of Infection, their a study to find antibodies made in response to infection by influenza A(H7N9) virus among any of the 14 close contacts of the only H7N9 case outside of mainland China, in Taiwan.None of the contacts had influenza-like illness (ILI) during a 28-day monitoring period and none had had significant levels of antibody.The...
Baboons and MERS-CoV....
This post is based on @dspalten and his interest materials and analysesTwitter yields all sorts of things to think about. Since the Lancet article on MERS-CoV-like antibody reactivity in dromedary camel sera, one tweeter has been a strong proponent of testing baboons, an African and Arabian old world,...
Camels being tested for MERS-CoV by Saudi Arabia?
An article on arabnews.com has Prof Ziad Memish saying that the Ministry of Health has "subjected samples from camels and sheep to lab tests" (not the long-delayed batch of samples Ian Lipkin recently received?).Hopefully that means PCR-based testing with any of the various assays publicly available. The article notes the results will be announced after tests...
Coronavirus family tree....
The phylogenetic tree below shows the relationships among the four genera of coronaviruses (CoVs); Genus Alphacoronavirus, Betacoronavirus, Deltacoronavirus, Gammacoronavirus. This tree is based on full length genomes (nucleotides; aligned using Geneious Pro; Neighbor-Joining tree built using Mega...
Editors's Note #11: A 5-min interview with me, on MERS-CoV
I was asked to chat about the MERS-CoV by FullSpectrumSurviviral, a YouTube Channel that produces the segment, News in Two Minutes.Their newest venture is a segment called 5 Minute Interviews, interviewing researchers and individuals on current topics with a view to providing short bursts of quality background information for an interested audience. Because VDU...
Human H7N9 case in Guangdong province: Update [Updated!]
Hat tip to crofblogs for alerting me to this news article.The Guangdong case was confirmed by Chinese CDCP.A story on Xinhuanet describes that most (54/96) of the contacts of the 51-year old positive woman have been released - it is not clear whether they were lab tested or only...
