Middle East Respiratory Syndrome in 3 Persons, South Korea, 2015

Abstract

In May 2015, Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus infection was laboratory confirmed in South Korea. Patients were a man who had visited the Middle East, his wife, and a man who shared a hospital room with the index patient. Rapid laboratory confirmation will facilitate subsequent prevention and control for imported cases.

Keywords: MERS; MERS-CoV; Middle East respiratory syndrome; South Korea; respiratory infections; viruses.

Figure 1

Timeline of events for patients infected with Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV). The laboratory diagnostic methods used for molecular detection of MERS-CoV RNA were multiplex MERS-CoV real-time reverse transcription PCRs targeting an upstream MERS-CoV envelope protein gene and an open reading frame 1a gene (8,9). KSA, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia; UAE, United Arab Emirates.

Figure 2

Phylogenetic tree comparing complete genome nucleotide sequences of Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) isolate from South Korea (KOR/KNIH/002_05_2015) with those of 67 reference MERS-CoVs (GenBank database). The tree was constructed by using the general time reversible plus gamma model of RAxML version 8.8.0 software (10) and visualized by using FigTree version 1.4.2 (http://tree.bio.ed.ac.uk/software/figtree). RAxML bootstrap values (1,000 replicates) are shown above the branches. Bootstrap values >75 are shown on the branches. The MERS-CoV strain from South Korea is shown in gray. National Center for Biotechnology Information accession numbers are shown before each taxon name. The unit of branch length is the number of substitutions per site. Scale bar indicates 4 × 10^–4 nucleotide substitutions per site.