MERS cases drop in KSA; alarm over medics becoming carriers

May 19, 2014

MERS cases drop
New York, May 19: The biggest risk that Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) will become a global epidemic, ironically, may lie with globe-trotting health care workers.

“This is how MERS might spread around the world,” said infectious disease expert Dr. Amesh Adalja of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

It can take five to 14 days for someone infected with MERS to show symptoms, more than enough time for a contagious person to fly to the other side of the world without being detectable.

Health care workers “are at extremely high risk of contracting MERS compared to the general public,” Adalja said.

The threat has attracted new attention with the confirmation of the first two MERS cases in the United States. Both are health care workers who fell ill shortly after leaving their work in Saudi hospitals and boarding planes bound west.

About one-third of the MERS cases treated in hospitals in Jeddah were health care workers, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

The Ministry of Health's counted 529 MERS infections since September 2012, of which 168 patients died as of May 17, 2014.

Despite the risk, few of the health care workers now in, or planning to go to, Saudi Arabia are having second thoughts about working there, according to nurses, doctors and recruiters interviewed by Reuters.

Michelle Tatro, 28, leaves next week for the kingdom, where she will work as an open-heart-surgery nurse. Tatro, who typically does 13-week stints at hospitals around the United States, said her family had sent her articles about MERS, but she wasn’t worried.

“I was so glad to get this job,” she told Reuters. “Travel is my number one passion.”

So far, international health authorities have not publicly expressed concern about the flow of expatriate medical workers to and from Saudi Arabia.

“There is not much public health authorities or border agents can do,” said infectious disease expert Dr. Michael Osterholm of the University of Minnesota. “Sure, they can ask people, ‘did you work in a health care facility in Saudi Arabia,’ but if the answer is yes, then what?“

Health care workers are best placed to understand the MERS risk, Osterholm said, and “there should be a heightened awareness among them of possible MERS symptoms.”

Neither the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention nor the Department of Homeland Security responded to questions about whether they were considering monitoring health care workers returning to the United States.

Soaring demand

In the last few years, the number of expatriates working in Saudi Arabia has soared, said Suleiman Arabie, managing director of Houston, Texas-based recruiting firm SA International, with thousands now working in the kingdom.

The Saudi government is building hundreds of hospitals and offering private companies interest-free loans to help build new facilities.

About 15 percent of physicians working in the Kingdom are American or European, and some 40 percent of nurses are Filipino or Malaysian, according to estimates by recruiters and people who have worked in hospitals there.

The majority of US-trained medical staff are on one- or two-year contracts, which results in significant churn as workers rotate in and out of Saudi medical facilities.

Arabie’s firm is trying to fill positions at two dozen medical facilities in Saudi Arabia for pulmonologists, a director of nursing, a chief of physiotherapy and scores more.

Doctors in lucrative, in-demand specialties such as cardiology and oncology can make $1 million for a two-year contract, recruiters said.

Nurses’ pay depends on their home country, with those from the United States and Canada earning around $60,000 a year while those from the Philippines get about $12,000, recruiters said. That typically comes with free transportation home, housing, and 10 weeks of paid vacation each year. For Americans, any income under about $100,000 earned abroad is tax-free, adding to the appeal of a Saudi posting.

Undaunted

One Filipino nurse, who spoke anonymously so as not to hurt her job prospects, told Reuters that she was “willing to go to Saudi Arabia because I don’t get enough pay here.” In a private hospital in Manila, she made 800 pesos (about $18) a day.

“I know the risks abroad but I’d rather take it than stay here,” she said. “I am not worried about MERS virus. I know how to take care of myself and I have the proper training.”

None of Arabie’s potential candidates “have expressed any concern” about MERS. Only one of the hundreds of professionals placed by Toronto-based medical staffing firm Helen Ziegler & Associates Inc. decided to return to the United States because of MERS, it said, and one decided not to accept a job in Jeddah she had been hired for.

Recruitment agencies in Manila have also continued to send nurses to the kingdom since the MERS outbreak, said Hans Leo Cacdac, the head of the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration. The government advises that returning workers be screened for MERS, Labor and Employment Secretary Rosalinda Baldoz said this week.

Expat health care workers now working in Saudi Arabia feel confident local authorities are taking the necessary steps to combat the spread of MERS in hospitals.

“Just today they came and put up giant posters in our hospital on MERS,” said Dr. Taher Kagalwala, a pediatrician originally from Mumbai who works at Al Moweh General Hospital in a town about 120 miles from Taif city in western Saudi Arabia.

“I have not heard of or seen any health care workers looking to leave their jobs or return to their countries because of the MERS panic. If it was happening, there would have been gossip very soon.”

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News Network
April 23,2024

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The genocidal Israeli war on the Gaza Strip has entered its 200th day, with occupation forces killing more Palestinians in defiance of widespread international outcry to end the carnage.

The aggression marked its 200th day on Tuesday with no end in sight to the Israeli war that has so far killed a shocking number of Palestinians and led to a humanitarian crisis in the besieged territory.

The Gaza Health Ministry said Israeli forces have committed three "massacres" over the past 24 hours, killing at least 32 Palestinians and wounding 59 others.

The numbers, it added, bring the Palestinian death toll to more than 34,183, with at least 77,143 injured and an estimated 7,000 missing and presumed dead since early October.

More than 14,500 children and 9,500 women are among those killed, making up over 70 percent of the victims, according to health officials.

Israel waged its brutal US-backed war on the Gaza Strip on October 7 after the Palestinian Hamas resistance group carried out Operation Al-Aqsa Storm against the usurping entity in retaliation for its intensified atrocities against the Palestinian people.

Israel has been carrying out war crimes in Gaza by deliberately starving people and forcing their evacuation, as well as targeting hospitals and schools sheltering displaced Palestinians.

Despite all these atrocities, the regime has failed to achieve its declared objectives of “destroying Hamas” and finding Israeli captives held in Gaza.

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News Network
April 27,2024

The spokesman for the Yemeni Armed Forces has said it has carried out new operations against American and British targets in retaliation for their aggression on the country.

Brigadier General Yahya Saree said on Friday that Yemen’s naval forces struck a British oil tanker in the Red Sea with missiles.

Saree also said the military also shot down an American MQ-9 drone in Sa’ada province.

He added that the new operations were also a show of solidarity with Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, amid the Israeli genocide there. 

“The Yemeni Armed Forces salute all the people of Yemen for their faithful response to the call of the fighter leader Sayyed Abdulmalik Badr El-Din Al-Houthi, may Allah protect him, in their unprecedented large-scale interaction in support of our oppressed brothers in the Gaza Strip, affirming support for the Armed Forces in their military operations against the ‘Israeli’ enemy and against the American-British aggression supporting it in the Red and Arabian Seas and the Indian Ocean,” Saree said.

He stressed that the Yemeni armed forces will continue operations in the Red and Arabian Seas as well as the Indian Ocean until the Western-backed Israeli genocide comes to a halt.

Since the start of the brutal campaign in Gaza, the regime has killed more than 34,300 Palestinians and injured over 77,000 others. It has cut off fuel, electricity, food and water to the more than two million Palestinians living there.

The Yemeni Armed Forces have been targeting Israeli vessels or those “associated” with the occupying regime in the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea since October 7, 2023.

The regime ignited its bloody war machine in the besieged Palestinian territory on that October day in response to Operation Al-Aqsa Storm conducted by the resistance movement Hamas.

The maritime attacks have forced some of the world’s biggest shipping and oil companies to suspend transit through one of the world’s most important maritime trade routes.

Tankers are instead adding thousands of miles to international shipping routes by sailing around the continent of Africa rather than going through the Suez Canal.

The pro-Palestine maritime campaign has also prompted airstrikes by the US and its allies on Yemen – in violation of the Yemeni sovereignty and international law.

In consequence, Yemen’s armed forces have declared US and British vessels as legitimate targets.

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News Network
April 30,2024

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Gaza civil defense agency has warned of a looming health disaster in the besieged Strip as the decomposition of dead bodies under the rubble of buildings destroyed by the relentless Israeli bombings accelerates.

The agency pointed on Tuesday to the risk of diseases and epidemics associated with the public decomposition of thousands of bodies due to rising temperature.

“The continued accumulation of thousands of bodies under the rubble has begun to cause the spread of disease and epidemics, especially with the onset of summer and the rise in temperatures, which accelerates the process of decomposition,” it said in a statement.

Seven months into the war, the Geneva-based Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor warned earlier that the decomposition of dead bodies for long periods leads to the transmission of serious diseases, including blood-borne viruses and tuberculosis.

"Gastrointestinal infections like cholera can also be easily spread through direct contact with dead bodies leaking excrement, soiled clothing, or contaminated tools or vehicles," it added.

In another report last week, Euro-Med Monitor also warned that thousands of corpses left in the streets or beneath house debris are rotting and being consumed by cats and dogs, which is an additional factor contributing to the spread of infectious diseases.

"The spread threatens the environment and public health in the Strip, and health authorities in the Strip have detected about one million cases of infectious diseases," the report added.

The Global Nutrition Group also estimates that at least 90 percent of the Gaza Strip’s children under the age of five are affected by one or more infectious diseases and that 70 percent have had diarrhea in the past two weeks—a 23-fold increase compared with the 2022 baseline.

Unexpected blistering temperatures across Gaza have also added to the daily misery faced by the enclave’s people and sparked new fears of disease outbreaks amid a lack of sufficient clean water and waste disposal, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, also known as UNRWA said on Thursday.

This comes as the death toll from Israel's genocidal campaign against Gaza rose to 34,535. Among the dead are more than 14,500 children and 9,500 women.

Since the war began on October 7, nearly 85 percent of Gaza's 2.3 million people have been displaced.

Vast swathes of the besieged territory are in ruins as Israel continues its onslaught, dropping at least 75,000 tons of explosives on Gaza, according to the Gaza Media Office.

Earlier this month, UNRWA, said 62 percent of all houses in the besieged territory have been damaged or destroyed.

Gaza Media Office recently reported that nearly 90,000 housing units have been destroyed while nearly 300,000 units have been damaged by the Israeli air and ground offensive.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported on Monday that nearly 37.5 million tons of conflict-generated debris are estimated to be present throughout Gaza, based on assessments by UN bodies.

The world’s hunger watchdog, known as the Integrated Food-Security Phase Classification (IPC), said in a report published on March 18 that about 1.1 million Palestinians in Gaza are living through catastrophic food insecurity, warning that famine is likely to strike by May in northern Gaza and can spread across the territory by July.

Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory, said in a report published in late March that there were clear indications that Israel has violated three of the five acts listed under the UN Genocide Convention.

These acts Albanese said were “killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to the group’s members; and deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

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