The World Health Organization said it would continue to monitor the situation in the region after a 28-year-old man was left in a life-threatening condition by the virus
A 28-year-old man has been left with a life-threatening condition after contracting a type of coronavirus(
Fears of a new outbreak have been raised after a man was struck down by a deadly virus.
The 28-year-old man was left in a life-threatening condition in an Abu Dhabi hospital after contracting MERS (coronavirus associated with Middle East Respiratory Syndrome).
The World Health Organization said it would continue to monitor the situation in the region.
MERS is closely related to Covid-19 as another member of the coronavirus family – but is not a strain of the same virus that caused the global pandemic, and was actually discovered several years earlier.
It was first identified by scientists in 2012 and is believed to be of animal origin. It is usually spread after humans have been in contact with camels.
At the time, it was identified as a priority pathogen because it causes severe disease that has a high fatality rate – even though it is much less transmissible than Covid.
Symptoms include high fever, cough, shortness of breath, chills, body aches, sore throat, headache, diarrhea, nausea/vomiting, and runny nose.
The WHO said the latest case of MERS involved a non-UAE national living in Al Ain city who visited a private medical clinic several times between June 3 and 7, 2023, complaining of vomiting, right flank pain and pain when urinating.
On June 8, he attended a public hospital with vomiting and gastrointestinal symptoms, including diarrhea, and was initially diagnosed with acute pancreatitis, acute kidney injury, and sepsis.
The 28-year-old man was in a critical condition until June 13 and was referred to an intensive care unit at a specialist hospital, where he was placed on mechanical ventilation. He tested positive for MERS-CoV by PCR on June 23, 2023.
The WHO said he had “no known history of direct contact with animals”, including one-horned camels, and had not consumed raw animal products.
He also had no known co-morbidities, no history of contact with people with MERS-CoV and no recent travel outside the UAE.
A total of 108 contacts were identified and monitored for 14 days from the last date of exposure – but no secondary infections were found. Prior to this case, the last MERS infection reported from the UAE was in November 2021.
The nation’s first laboratory-confirmed case of MERS was in July 2013, and since then 94 cases of MERS-CoV have been reported — with only 12 deaths linked to the virus in the past decade.