La DG de l’OMS agite la menace du #MERS-CoV à l’Assemblée générale
Ten years after Sars, now we have Mers - Health News - Health & Families - The Independent
▻http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/ten-years-after-sars-now-we-have-mers-8640817.html
Margaret Chan, director general of the World Health Organization, did not mince her words. The deadly Sars-like virus that has spread in recent months from the Middle East to Germany, France and the UK, killing more than half of those it has infected, is a “threat to the entire world”.
Since it emerged in Saudi Arabia in September last year, the new virus has spread to 50 people in eight countries and claimed 30 lives. But it is not what it has done that is worrying – it is what it may do.
et le directeur du Centre de surveillance de la grippe du R.-U. prêche pour sa paroisse et le #H7N9
While Mers is causing alarm in the Middle East and Europe, health experts in the Far East are worrying over a different threat – from a new strain of flu that could be a harbinger of the next pandemic.
H7N9 has been described as the “nastiest virus in humans in years”. It is deadly, resistant to anti-flu drugs and poses a “serious threat” because of its potential to mutate and create a new pandemic strain, according to Professor John McCauley, director of the WHO’s collaborating centre for flu surveillance in the UK.
There have been 132 laboratory confirmed cases and 37 deaths, says the WHO. The latest case is a six-year-old boy who became ill in Beijing on 21 May. The virus has spread to half a dozen provinces in China and to Taiwan but appears to have slowed in the past month.
