Middle East Respiratory Syndrome

By Alimuddin Zumla, D. S. Hui, Stanley Perlman. The Lancet, 2015

1,574 citations recorded by the source corpus.

SUMMARY The Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) is a newly recognized highly lethal respiratory disease caused by a novel single stranded, positive sense RNA betacoronavirus (MERS-CoV). Dromedary camels, host species for MERS-CoV are implicated in the direct or indirect transmission to humans, although the exact mode of transmission remains unknown. First isolated from a patient who died from a severe respiratory illness in June 2012 in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, as of 16 February 2015, 983 laboratory-confirmed cases of MERS-CoV (360 deaths; 36.6% mortality) were reported to the WHO. Cases have been acquired in both the community and hospitals with limited human-to-human transmission reported in the community. Whilst the majority of MERS cases have occurred in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, cases have been reported from Europe, USA and Asia in people who traveled from the Middle East or their contacts. Clinical features of MERS range from asymptomatic or mild disease to acute respiratory distress syndrome and multi-organ failure resulting in death, especially in individuals with underlying co-morbidities. There is no specific drug treatment for MERS and infection prevention and control measures are crucial to prevent spread of MERS-CoV in health care facilities. MERS-CoV continues to be an endemic,low level public health threat. However, the concern remains that the virus could mutate to exhibit increased interhuman transmissibility, increasing pandemic potential. Our seminar presents an overview of current knowledge and perspectives on the epidemiology, virology, mode of transmission, pathogen-host responses, clinical features, diagnosis and development of new drugs and vaccines.

Subfields: Epidemiology, Infectious Diseases

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/72076bc07694d7ba7e9fd2adfcb10b11fde1c9ba

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Epidemiology

1. S. Perlman
2. Barney S. Graham
3. Jun Zheng
4. P. Zimmet

In Infectious Diseases

1. S. Perlman
2. Jun Zheng
3. Fang Li
4. Abdo A. Elfiky
5. Hongzhou Lu
6. F. Krammer
7. Yu Chen
8. Qianyun Liu

Citations in the corpus

• Loss of Bcl-6-Expressing T Follicular Helper Cells and Germinal Centers in COVID-19 (2020, neutral): “This may be similar to SARS and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), where humoral responses were generally not durable except in a subset of individuals (Mo et al., 2006; Zumla et al., 2015).”
• SARS-CoV-2: an Emerging Coronavirus that Causes a Global Threat (2020, background): “The mode of transmission by MERSCoV is not well understood but is believed to spread largely via the respiratory close contact route [39,40].”
• COVID-19 Patient Health Prediction Using Boosted Random Forest Algorithm (2020, background): “(4); therefore, there is a possibility of non-febrile patients being missed by a surveillance mechanism with a primary focus on detecting fever (5).”
• Neurologic Manifestations of Hospitalized Patients With Coronavirus Disease 2019 in Wuhan, China. (2020, background): “Acute cerebrovascular disease 9 (1-18) 10 (1-18) 1 (1) NA”
• Corticosteroid Therapy for Critically Ill Patients with Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (2017, background): “To date, there is no specific treatment for MERS, and management is largely supportive (1, 2).”
• Predictors of mortality for patients with COVID-19 pneumonia caused by SARS-CoV-2: a prospective cohort study (2020, background): “[16] As of the midnight of March 24, 2020, numbers of Chinese confirmed COVID-19 pneumonia cases and death were 81218 and 3281, respectively, indicating that the overall death rate of COVID-19 pneumonia was 4%.”
• Dysregulated type I interferon and inflammatory monocyte-macrophage responses cause lethal pneumonia in SARS-CoV-infected mice (2016, background): “Highly pathogenic respiratory coronaviruses (CoV) such as severe acute respiratory syndrome CoV (SARS-CoV) and Middle East respiratory syndrome CoV (MERS-CoV) pose substantial challenges to public health (Peiris et al., 2004; Zumla et al., 2015).”
• Bacterial co-infection and secondary infection in patients with COVID-19: a living rapid review and meta-analysis (2020, background): “There are scant data on bacterial co-infections from patients infected with SARS-CoV-1 and MERS-Co-V [41,46,47].”
• Pathogenic human coronavirus infections: causes and consequences of cytokine storm and immunopathology (2017, neutral): “disease, particularly after MERS-CoV infection [25, 26].”