Behavioral responses to the 2015 MERS epidemic in Korea

2015 MERS outbreak in Korea: hospital-to-hospital transmission

The distinct characteristic of the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) outbreak in South Korea is that it not only involves intra-hospital transmission, but it also involves hospital-to-hospital transmission. It has been the largest MERS outbreak outside the Middle East, with 186 confirmed cases and, among them, 36 fatal cases as of July 26, 2015. All confirmed cases are suspected to be hos...

A lesson learned from the MERS epidemic in Korea: an essay on MERS

In the mid-1970s, a literary magazine published in Seoul had asked a number of people in the natural sciences, to write a short science fiction about Korean society a hundred years in the future. They were the ones who from time to time contributed life sciences-related articles to various press media. I was also requested to write a manuscript for the medical field, and the work I had written ...

Nosocomial amplification of MERS-coronavirus in South Korea, 2015.

Background Nosocomial amplification resulted in nearly 200 cases of Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) during the 2015 South Korean MERS-coronavirus outbreak. It remains unclear whether certain types of cases were more likely to cause secondary infections than others, and if so, why. Methods Publicly available demographic and transmission network data for all cases were collected from th...

MERS-CoV Antibody Responses 1 Year after Symptom Onset, South Korea, 2015

We investigated the kinetics of the Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) neutralizing and spike protein antibody titers over the course of 1 year in 11 patients who were confirmed by reverse transcription PCR to have been infected during the outbreak in South Korea in 2015. Robust antibody responses were detected in all survivors who had severe disease; responses remained det...

Objective Determination of End of MERS Outbreak, South Korea, 2015.