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Two sick U.S. hospital workers cleared of MERS infection

15 May 2014 04:30 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. Two workers at a Florida hospital who fell ill after caring for a second U.S. imported case of the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) virus have been cleared of infection, a spokesman for the hospital said Wednesday, APA reports quoting Xinhua.

"The two team members from Dr. P. Phillips Hospital who were symptomatic have tested NEGATIVE for MERS," the hospital's spokesman Geo Morales said in an email.

"This includes the team member who was hospitalized on Monday, May 12 and the team member who was discharged on Monday, May 12," Morales said.

The spokesman said they are still awaiting test results on the other 18 healthcare workers who came into contact with a confirmed MERS patient, a 44-year-old male healthcare worker in the hospital who tested positive for the MERS virus on Monday after returning from a visit to Saudi Arabia this month.

The patient, the second person in the U.S. confirmed to be infected with the virus, "remains in isolation" at the hospital but "has been fever free for 24 hours and clinically is doing well, " Morales said.

The first U.S. case of MERS, an American healthcare worker who also came home from Saudi Arabia last month, has been released from the hospital.

So far, there have been more than 500 confirmed cases of MERS infection in 14 countries with at least 145 deaths, and all reported cases have been linked to countries in the Arabian Peninsula.

Most of these people developed severe acute respiratory illness, with fever, cough, and shortness of breath. Doctors do not know where the virus comes from or exactly how it spreads. There is no available vaccine or specific treatment recommended for the virus.