JIDDA, Saudi Arabia — As the virus tore through the city’s largest hospital, jumping from bed to bed and afflicting scores of people, terror filled the wards. Some doctors and nurses refused to treat the sick or stopped coming to work altogether. Patients panicked. One surgeon recalled a man with a broken limb trying to flee the emergency room so he would not catch it, too. “Everyone was afraid,” the surgeon, Dr. Mohammed Ahmed, said of the spike in cases this spring. It was the darkest hour since the new illness, known as Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, or MERS, first appeared in Saudi Arabia late in 2012. In all, more than 700 cases have been documented in 20 countries, nearly all of them linked to Saudi Arabia. More than 250 people have died. The sudden spread of a mysterious and fatal new virus is reminiscent of the early days of SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome, a related disease that appeared in dozens of countries and killed more than 770 people, principally in Asia in 2003.
Posted on: Mon, 30 Jun 2014 11:50:09 +0000
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