Will an emerging viral disease ruin this year’s Hajj
proceedings?
By:Ringo Bones
Even though it was discovered near the end of 2012, Saudi
authorities were criticized for its delayed handling of MERS – Middle Eastern
Respiratory Virus – which is also prevalent across the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, etc.
and now threatens to disrupt the 2014 Hajj pilgrimage. Given the relatively “silent”
spread of the virus, it was only as recently as July 2013 that the structure
and histology of the MERS virus was fully documented.
Caused by a coronavirus called MERS-CoV which in humans will
result in severe acute respiratory illness, symptoms of which includes cough
and shortness of breath and in the advanced stages of the disease results in
severe pneumonia and kidney failure. About 30 percent of people confirmed to
have MERS-CoV infection have died. As of the middle of September 2014, there
are 855 cases of MERS-CoV worldwide and 333 deaths so far. The virus was traced
back to camels, but the way Middle Eastern public health authorities “downplayed”
the urgency of the risk of the virus – which was way cavalier in comparison to
the way public health authorities in East Asia handled the 2003 SARS
coronavirus outbreak – resulted in the sacking of various health officials that
included the health minister of Saudi Arabia which was personally sacked by HRS
The King of Saudi Arabia himself for downplaying the risk of the MERS outbreak since
2013.
Due to the recent public health revamp, hospitals in Saudi
Arabia has since taken more sensible precautions to avoid inadvertently spreading
the MERS-CoV virus by having their nurses and other medical personnel to wash
with disinfectant soaps before seeing other patients while doing their rounds
on suspected MERS virus infected patients. Due to the increased urgency, Prof.
Tariq Madani – the Saudi government’s scientific advisor on MERS recently spoke
to the BBC back in the middle of September of 2014 that even though they still
currently know very little of the MERS-CoV virus, safeguards are already
implemented to avoid the spread of the virus during the upcoming Hajj
pilgrimage in Mecca which is slated to greet a little over 2-million pilgrims
this year. And Saudi Arabia’s acting health minister Adel Bin Muhammad Fakeih
are urging camel merchants on the outskirts of Jeddah to take the necessary
precautions on wearing masks and gloves when handling their camels. Though the
camel merchants across the Middle East are still adopting a cavalier attitude
when it comes to taking the necessary precautions against the MERS virus.
Even though Saudi Arabia’s public health authorities are
doing the best they can to tackle the current MERS outbreak, the world narrowly
averted a similar pandemic of a relatively unknown virus that was killing
horses and their trainers in Australia during the mid-1990s. Back in September 1994,
health authorities in Australia were worried. More than a dozen prize
racehorses at the Hendra stables, outside of Brisbane in Australia’s northeast,
were ill, running temperatures of up to 41 degrees Celsius. The animals had
difficulty breathing and were emitting a bloody froth from their mouths and
noses. Some began to die a ghastly, wheezing death. Within days, the worst
fears of the public health authorities were realized: both the trainer and his
stable-hand had collapsed, also suffering from respiratory problems.
The symptoms matched those of the African horse virus, or of
equine influenza, both of which could spread from the Hendra stables and wreak
havoc across Australia. But the infection of the two men raised another, more
sinister possibility – that the health authorities were dealing with an unknown
organism not only fatal to horses, but also capable of affecting humans as
well.
Samples of horse spleen, lung and blood were sent to the
Australian Animal Health Laboratory in Geelong – an imposing concrete structure
outside Melbourne that houses one of the world’s most advanced infectious
disease centers. Blood samples were from the two infected men were also rushed
to the infectious diseases “hot labs” of Melbourne Fairfield Hospital and to
the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.A.
Electron microscopy later revealed that the virus grown in
the media had similarities with a large family of viruses called
Paramyxoviridae, which includes measles, canine distemper and a then newly
identified disease first seen to affect seals back in 1994, But it had an array
of protrusions like no other paramyxovirus and no Paramyxoviridae are known to
cause serious disease in both horses and humans. Not long after, scientists in
Brisbane also isolated a virus which matched that found by the Geelong group. Sadly
though the trainer died and equine morbillivirus still flare up time and time
again in that region, the virus’s relatively high fatality rate seems to be its
own containment mechanism that prevents equine morbillivirus from becoming a
global pandemic.
