Healthcare | Saturday 28 February, 2015 9:04 am |

The Ministry of Health announced that the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) had claimed two more lives.
The people who died were two Saudi men aged 84 and 51, from Queiyah and Hofuf. They were non-medical personnel and had pre-existing illnesses.
There were no infections recorded in the 24 hours up until Friday noon.

The ministry had announced three deaths on Thursday, two in Makkah and one in Riyadh, with three people infected from Alkhobar, Al-Jouf and Riyadh.
Since June 2012, there have been 916 MERS cases, with 394 deaths. Five hundred patients have been cured, with 21 under treatment at hospitals, and one person isolated at home, according to the ministry’s website.

Meanwhile, King Saud University closed down its emergency section temporarily on Thursday as a precautionary measure on fears that an infected person may have turned up at its medical facility.
In a statement published in a local daily, Abdulrahman Al-Muammar, executive director of the KSU medical facility, said a 90-year-old Saudi woman, who had sought treatment for bleeding in her bowel, was suspected to have the virus.

“The person was transferred to the Prince Muhammed bin Abdulaziz Hospital in the east of Riyadh for observation. The hospital, which is maintained by the ministry of health, runs an isolation ward for patients infected with the virus.”


As a precautionary measure, the authorities at the medical city disinfected its emergency department. All the patients and health staff in the section were tested and found negative.

Al-Muammar said that the hospital had dealt with four cases of people infected with the virus during the current year.