RESEARCH ARTICLE
Occurrence of the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (MERS-CoV) across the Gulf Corporation Council countries: Four years update Mahmoud Aly1,2*, Mohamed Elrobh3, Maha Alzayer1, Sameera Aljuhani1,2,4, Hanan Balkhy1,2,4 1 King Abdullah International Medical Research Center, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, 2 King Saud bin Abdulaziz University for Health Sciences, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, 3 Department of Biochemistry, College of Sciences, King Saud University Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, 4 King Abdulaziz Medical City, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111
OPEN ACCESS Citation: Aly M, Elrobh M, Alzayer M, Aljuhani S, Balkhy H (2017) Occurrence of the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (MERS-CoV) across the Gulf Corporation Council countries: Four years update. PLoS ONE 12(10): e0183850. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0183850 Editor: Rasheed Ahmad, Dasman Diabetes Institute, KUWAIT Received: May 2, 2017 Accepted: August 12, 2017 Published: October 13, 2017 Copyright: © 2017 Aly et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting Information files. Funding: This study has been supported by funds from King Abdullah International Medical Research Center KAIMRC (IRB #RC15/128). Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
*
[email protected]
Abstract The emergence of the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (MERS-CoV) infections has become a global issue of dire concerns. MERS-CoV infections have been identified in many countries all over the world whereas high level occurrences have been documented in the Middle East and Korea. MERS-CoV is mainly spreading across the geographical region of the Middle East, especially in the Arabian Peninsula, while some imported sporadic cases were reported from the Europe, North America, Africa, and lately Asia. The prevalence of MERS-CoV infections across the Gulf Corporation Council (GCC) countries still remains unclear. Therefore, the objective of the current study was to report the prevalence of MERS-CoV in the GCC countries and to also elucidate on its demographics in the Arabian Peninsula. To date, the World Health Organization (WHO) has reported 1,797 laboratory-confirmed cases of MERS-CoV infection since June 2012, involving 687 deaths in 27 different countries worldwide. Within a time span of 4 years from June 2012 to July 2016, we collect samples form MERS-CoV infected individuals from National Guard Hospital, Riyadh, and Ministry of health Saudi Arabia and other GCC countries. Our data comprise a total of 1550 cases (67.1% male and 32.9% female). The age-specific prevalence and distribution of MERS-CoV was as follow:
