MERS-CoV scare: Search for 174 passengers intensified

Health authorities have opened a Facebook account, bought newspaper ad space for the names of 174 out of the 415 passengers of a flight from the Middle East who had yet to submit themselves as of Monday to nose-and-throat swab test for a deadly virus and enlisted the help of the police in tracing them.

President Benigno Aquino III would have wanted that all the copassengers of a male Filipino nurse, who initially tested positive for the deadly Middle East Respiratory Syndrome-Corona Virus (MERS-CoV), be contacted by the Department of Health (DOH) by Tuesday.

At a press briefing, Dr. Lyndon Lee Suy, DOH Emerging Infectious Diseases program manager, on Tuesday said that Mr. Aquino had strongly recommended that the agency’s contact-tracing efforts for all the passengers of Etihad Airways Flight No. EY 0424 should have been completed a week after they had arrived in the country.

The male nurse, who arrived in Manila from the United Arab Emirates on April 15, was initially diagnosed with MERS-CoV while he was still at the UAE. But the two tests conducted on him by the Research Institute for Tropical Medicine (RITM) in Muntinlupa City yielded negative results.

The nurse came into contact with a Filipino paramedic who died of MERS-CoV in the UAE.

“The strong recommendation by the President is for us to be able to contact and locate all the passengers within today. We are working hard and all our efforts are focused on finding these passengers. We are optimistic we can meet the President’s deadline,” Lee Suy said.

“So far, we’re doing good. We don’t see any problem with (contact tracing). But of course, the faster, the better,” he added.

MERS-CoV is a communicable disease that may be passed on to others through close contact with a positive carrier. It has an incubation period of 10 to 14 days and symptoms may include fever, coughing, sneezing and runny nose two weeks after exposure.

The World Health Organization has recorded 242 confirmed cases of MERS-CoV, including 93 deaths, since it was first discovered in March 2012 in Saudi Arabia.

At least eight overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) have been found positive for the virus. Two of them—one in Saudi Arabia and another in the UAE—reportedly died on Aug. 29 and April 10, respectively.

Lee Suy declined to provide details on how many new passengers the DOH had already contacted, how many had been tested, or even the results of the tests. “It is up to Malacañang to release specific numbers,” he said.