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World Health Organization
(WHO) Director-General Margaret Chan speaks during a meeting with South Korean
Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se at the foreign ministry in Seoul Thursday, June
18, 2015. (Jung Yeon-je/Pool Photo via AP)
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The head of the World Health Organization has praised
beleaguered South Korean officials and exhausted health workers, saying their
efforts to contain a deadly MERS virus outbreak have put the country on good
footing and lowered the public risk.
Margaret Chan said it's a
good sign the disease has so far been confined to a handful of hospitals and
isn't spreading in the wider community.
"All the new
information is reassuring, but that reassurance must be qualified," Chan
said Thursday at a news conference in Seoul. She cautioned that much about MERS
is unknown and there's still a need to strengthen monitoring and quarantine
efforts.
AP report continues:
Despite the optimism,
there is still widespread worry here, and the discovery of new cases among
people who managed to slip through quarantine measures has raised questions
about officials' ability to control the outbreak.
Middle East respiratory
syndrome has killed 24 people and sickened more than 160 people in South Korea,
the biggest outbreak outside the region where it was first seen in 2012.
However, the number of people isolated at home and in medical facilities
declined from about 6,700 on Thursday to just more than 5,900 on Friday, with
more than 5,500 people so far released from the quarantine, the Health Ministry
said.
The daily number of new
cases has been limited to single digits for most of the week, adding weight to
official claims that the infections are slowing. The outbreak started a month
ago with a 68-year-old man who had traveled to the Middle East.
Most of the fatalities
have been people with existing medical conditions, such as respiratory problems
or cancer.
Chan said South Korea's
initial sluggish reaction might have contributed to the wider-than-expected
spread of a virus that usually moves poorly between people. South Korean
officials early on struggled to trace and identify the contacts of those
infected, and their initial refusal to name the hospitals where MERS patients
had been treated was blamed for fanning public fear and unwillingness to
cooperate.
"After a slow start,
the government put in place one of the strongest responses I've seen,"
Chan said.
Officials say the
outbreak has already peaked and could be defused by the end of the month.
Experts say the coming week will be an important indicator in determining
whether the MERS outbreak will end shortly.
Critics, including Seoul
Mayor Park Won-soon, say government officials accelerated the spread of MERS by
failing to enforce tight control measures at Seoul's Samsung Medical Center,
which was belatedly shut down over the weekend because it continued to be the
main source of infections.
Dozens of patients,
medical staff and visitors have been infected with MERS at the hospital, one of
the country's biggest, and are believed to have contacted thousands of other
people before their conditions were confirmed.
The sheer size of the
exposure at the hospital suggests the country could see another large wave of
infections, according to Jacob Lee from the infectious disease department at
Seoul's Kangnam Sacred Heart Hospital.
Lee said infected medical
staff at Samsung could be the next major spreaders of the virus. The country's
recent MERS cases include a Samsung doctor, nurse, X-ray technician and an
ambulance worker.
Government officials said
they are monitoring the health of some 3,000 people who had various levels of
contact with the Samsung ambulance worker, who transported dozens of patients
to the hospital and used the subway to commute before his condition was
confirmed. Officials are also calling and texting some 50,000 people who
visited the hospital in late May and early June to ask if they are experiencing
MERS-related symptoms such as fever, cough and shortness of breath.
There is no vaccine to
prevent the disease.
WHO said in a statement
Wednesday that the spread of MERS in South Korea doesn't merit being declared a
global emergency.
Thailand on Thursday
confirmed its first MERS case, a 75-year-old man who recently arrived from Oman
for treatment of a heart condition.
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