The 61-year-old man, whose personal information was withheld for privacy reasons, was diagnosed with the disease at about 4 p.m. Saturday, the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC) said. It is the first case of MERS diagnosed in South Korea since 2015, when an outbreak killed 38 people and triggered widespread panic. According to the KCDC, the man took a business trip to Kuwait from Aug. 16 to Sept. 6 and returned home via the United Arab Emirates on Friday. He visited a local hospital during his stay in Kuwait for diarrhea but showed the same symptom again on his way back home. He was rushed to the emergency room of Samsung Medical Center in southern Seoul upon his arrival at Incheon International Airport. The Samsung hospital checked the patient in an isolated section of the emergency room and reported him to the health authorities as a suspected case of MERS for showing symptoms of fever, phlegm and pneumonia. He was then moved to Seoul National University (SNU) Hospital in central Seoul and tested positive for the disease. “The man currently is not in a critical condition and does not have such symptoms as shortness of breath and a decrease in blood pressure, but we have to watch him closely because his conditions may deteriorate in the next one to two weeks judging from our experiences from the previous outbreak,” Kim Nam-jung, a doctor treating the patient at the SNU Hospital, said. MERS is a viral respiratory disease… [Read full story]
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