Global health leaders blast Seoul’s response to MERS
SEOUL — The South Korean government’s failure to share information quickly with the public and establish an efficient disease-control system contributed to worsening the outbreak of Middle East respiratory syndrome in the country, a panel of experts from the World Health Organization and South Korea said Saturday.
The experts have spent the past week visiting hospitals and meeting with health authorities to assess the outbreak, which has killed 14 people, and make recommendations.
“One of the things South Korea failed to do was a transparent and rapid distribution of information, which is the most important thing to do,” Lee Jongkoo, leader of the South Korean side of the joint mission, said at a news conference Saturday.
A “failure to establish proper governance” in controlling the outbreak in its early stages also contributed to confusion among the public, Lee said.
The disease, known as MERS, is known to have infected 138 people in South Korea since the first patient was identified on May 20. The outbreak is the largest to date outside the Middle East, where the virus emerged in 2012 in Saudi Arabia and has killed more than 400 people.
One of the tasks of the joint mission was to determine why so many people were infected in South Korea in a relatively short period of time. On Saturday, Keiji Fukuda, the chief World Health Organization official on the panel, pointed to several factors: South Korean doctors’ unfamiliarity with MERS; the country’s overcrowded emergency rooms; the practice of “doctor shopping” for care at many different clinics; and the fact that hospital rooms tend to be bustling with visitors. Nearly all of the country’s confirmed MERS patients were infected while seeking care or while visiting patients at hospitals. Hospital staff members were also infected.
Fukuda said the panel had found no evidence to indicate that MERS is spreading in the broader population. “However, continued monitoring for this possibility is critical throughout the entire outbreak,” he said. Both Fukuda and Lee said the rate of new infections is decreasing. Twelve new MERS cases were reported Saturday.