Fakeih: 80% drop in MERS infections

June 6, 2014

Riyadh, Jun 6: There has been an 80 percent decrease in the number of MERS coronavirus cases during the past six weeks due to the preventive measures, Acting Health Minister Adel Fakeih has told the Shoura Council.

Fakeih enumerated the measures taken by the Ministry of Health in coordination with all local and global agencies and the ministry of agriculture. He said that the same efforts would be further intensified during the Umrah and Haj season to have the disease under control in the Kingdom.

“The ministry will be able to ensure proactive and swift action against future public health challenges, such as MERS-CoV through continuous coordination and monitoring. Topnotch clinicians, scientists, researchers and health care and emergency planning experts will work for a new health Command and Control Center (CCC).

The CCC will ensure that health challenges are managed with a systematic, holistic and comprehensive approach.

The center currently has 11 platforms, each of which is tasked with a specific topic, all under the coordination of the control tower platform.

“We have now documented every single MERS case that occurred in the Kingdom since September 2012,” the minister said, pointing out that so far 689 cases have been reported including 283 deaths. A total of 53 patients are under treatment and 353 have recovered from the illness.

He said the summer season would not aggravate the spread of the disease in the Kingdom. However, he added that concerted efforts must be made by people to observe personal hygiene to cover their noses while sneezing and coughing. He said the ministry is in the process of gearing up its 500 hospitals to meet the health challenges in the country.

Meanwhile, researchers have found the first direct evidence that the virus jumps directly from camels to humans.

The latest findings in the New England Journal of Medicine are based on a 44-year-old Saudi man who kept a herd of nine camels and who died of MERS in November 2013.

His friends said they witnessed him applying a topical medicine to the nose of one of his ill camels — four of them were reportedly sick with nasal discharge — seven days before he himself became stricken with MERS.

Researchers sequenced the virus found in one of the sick camels and the virus that killed the man, and found that their genomes were identical.

“These data suggest that this fatal case of human MERS-CoV infection was transmitted through close contact with an infected camel,” said the study led by Tariq Madani at the department of medicine, King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah.

Previous research has suggested that the virus has been quite common in camels for at least the past 20 years, and was likely making the jump into humans.

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UN condemns Israeli regime’s ‘organized torture’ against Palestinians

News Network

November 30,2025

The United Nations Committee against Torture (CAT) has condemned the Israeli regime for enforcing a policy of “organized torture” against Palestinians.

In a report published on Friday, CAT stated that the occupying regime enforces a deliberate policy of “organized and widespread torture and ill-treatment” against Palestinian abductees, particularly since October 7, 2023, when Israel launched its genocidal war on Gaza.

The committee expressed “deep concern over repeated severe beatings, dog attacks, electrocution, water-boarding, use of prolonged stress positions [and] sexual violence” inflicted on Palestinians.

Palestinian prisoners were degraded by “being made to act like animals or being urinated on,” systematically denied medical care, and subjected to excessive restraints, “in some cases resulting in amputation,” the report added.

CAT also condemned the routine application of “unlawful combatants law” to justify the prolonged detention without trial of thousands of Palestinian men, women, and children.

More than 10,000 Palestinians, including women and children, are currently held in Israeli prisons, according to Palestinian and international human rights groups, with 3,474 Palestinians in “administrative detention,” meaning they are imprisoned without trial for indefinite periods.

The report highlighted the “high proportion of children who are currently detained without charge or on remand,” noting that while Israel sets the age of criminal responsibility at 12, even younger children have been abducted.

Children designated as security prisoners face severe restrictions on family contact, may be subjected to solitary confinement, and are denied access to education, in clear violation of international law.

The committee further suggested that Israel’s policies across the Occupied Territories constitute collective torture against the Palestinian population.

“A range of policies adopted by Israel in the course of its continued unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory amounts to cruel, inhuman or degrading living conditions for the Palestinian population,” the report said.

On Thursday, the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas condemned the systematic killing and torture of Palestinian abductees in Israeli prisons, urging international action to halt these abuses.

Citing human rights data, Hamas stated that 94 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli prisons since the start of Tel Aviv’s genocidal war on Gaza.

“This reflects an organized criminal approach that has turned these prisons into direct killing grounds to eliminate our people,” the resistance movement said.

Hamas called on the international community, the UN, and human rights organizations to immediately pressure Israel to end crimes against prisoners and uphold their rights as guaranteed by all international conventions and norms.

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