Many Saudis shrug off MERS risk from camels

MERS is scary. Last week, while avoiding the term global health emergency, the World Health Organization announced that the deadly viral infection was both serious and urgent. There have been about 600 cases of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, 175 of them fatal.

There’s one place, however, where the mood about MERS isn’t scaring everyone. It’s also the place where the infection was first reported in 2012 and where almost 500 recorded cases have been found: Saudi Arabia.

Skepticism about the virus has taken a strange turn there: Saudis have begun kissing camels.

“Do sneeze in my face,” a farmer says in a video clip posted by Gulf News. “They claim camels carry the coronavirus,” he continues in the video, which has been watched more than 11,000 times.

On Twitter, photographs of men kissing and stroking their camels have been accompanied with comments disparaging MERS.

There’s something behind it: Last week, the Saudi government began a campaign to stop people from eating raw camel meat and liver and drinking unpasteurized camel milk. Experts argue that MERS coronavirus, or traces of it, have been found in a large number of the camels tested in Saudi Arabia, and antibodies from the virus have even been found in camel populations in Spain’s Canary Islands.

Camels might not be the main source of MERS (many experts point the finger at bats), but they certainly seem like one big possibility.

But for some people in Saudi Arabia, avoiding camels is not such an easy task.

A study in 2008 found that Saudi Arabia had almost 900,000 camels, and almost 15 million were in other Arab states.

“Camels in the kingdom are like dairy cows, beef cows, racehorses, pulling horses, beloved Labradors and living daily reminders of holy scripture, all in one,” Cynthia Gorney wrote for National Geographic last week, noting that camels are featured honorably in the Quran.