Egypt warns against travel to Saudi Arabia as new cases of Mers emerge

Cairo: Egypt’s Health Ministry issued a warning on Friday against children, elderly people and anyone suffering from chronic heart and chest diseases travelling to Saudi Arabia due to an outbreak there of a deadly new virus.

Saudi Arabia said on Thursday the number of cases of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (Mers), an often fatal disease caused by a coronavirus, had nearly doubled in April, with 26 more infections reported on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Of the more than 370 people who caught the disease in Saudi Arabia, 107 have died since Mers first emerged two years ago.

The first case of the disease in Egypt was reported on Thursday, in a 27-year-old man who lives in Saudi Arabia but returned ill to Egypt last week after having been in contact with an uncle in the kingdom who died of Mers.

International concern about the disease is acute because Saudi Arabia is expected to receive large numbers of foreign pilgrims during the fasting month of Ramadan in July, followed by millions more for Islam’s annual Hajj pilgrimage in October.

In a statement, Egypt’s health ministry said that anyone under the age of 15 or older than 65, as well as pregnant women and people suffering from chronic heart and chest diseases, should postpone pilgrimages to Saudi Arabia.

It said no further Mers cases had been confirmed in Egypt.

The man who contracted the virus is in a stable condition in a hospital in Cairo, a health ministry official said.

On Thursday, Jordan announced the detection of two new cases of Mers, one a Saudi man and the other a Jordanian medic who was treating him.

State news agency Petra, which carried the report, said this brought to seven the total number of people who were diagnosed in Jordan with the disease since 2012.

Health ministry official Mohammad Abdallat told Petra that the Saudi man aged 25 was being treated in a private Amman hospital.

“The Jordanian medic, 28 got infected while he was treating the Saudi patient. He is in a stable condition,” Abdallat, who heads the ministry’s communicable disease unit, said without elaborating.

Jordan reported the first death of Mers virus this year in February, after two previous fatalities in 2012.

Mers first emerged in 2012 and is mostly focused on Saudi Arabia where it has killed 107 people, according to health officials in the oil-rich kingdom.

Mers is considered a deadlier but less-transmissible cousin of the Sars virus that erupted in Asia in 2003 and infected 8,273 people, nine per cent of whom died.

There are no vaccines or antiviral treatments for Mers, a severe respiratory disease with a mortality rate of more than 40 per cent that experts are still struggling to understand.