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which has been spurred by a loss of bat habitat.

Early on in the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) outbreak, public health authorities said infection required close contact with patients. The common wisdom in the medical community was that only those who spent an hour or more within two meters of a person with MERS would contract the virus.

Now some health experts are calling for new preventive measures to check the spread, concluding that Koreans may be infected even without the same kind of close contact established as necessary in Middle Eastern cases of the virus.

“The spread of infection in South Korea has been very different from what we saw in the Middle East, to the point where some people are questioning whether airborne MERS infections are taking place,” said Yonsei University Graduate School of Public Health professor and former Korea Center for Disease Control and Prevention director Jun Byung-yool.

“One of the reasons [for the difference] may be that people in the Middle East have antibodies against the MERS virus from their frequent contact with camels, and South Koreans don‘t have them,” Jun added.

The argument is that South Koreans may contract the MERS virus even from relatively light exposure.

“What we should be doing right now is analyzing the spread of infection in South Korea again and establishing measures to prevent it,” Jun said.

Indeed, some cases of MERS infection in South Korea have involved exposure for as little as ten minutes. Healthcare workers in the emergency room at Samsung Seoul Hospital were infected after spending 30 to 40 minutes treating other patients who did not have the virus. At St. Mary’s Hospital in Pyeongtaek, Gyeonggi Province the first patient spread MERS to other patients who were on the same floor in different rooms.

In all cases, the infections are following a different pattern from those seen in the Middle East. Numerous factors have been cited as reasons for the difference, from inadequate infection safeguarding at hospitals to the tendency for patients to have a lot of contact. Jun’s remarks are the first on-the-record claim that South Koreans may be more vulnerable because they don’t have the same antibodies as people in the Middle East.

In 2012 and 2013, a study was carried out on 10,000 asymptomatic individuals in Saudi Arabia, the country where MERS first emerged. The results showed 15 people possessing antibodies for the virus. They were cases of people who had been infected, but experienced only minor symptoms before recovering.

In some cases of older infections, antibody concentrations eventually drop below threshold levels and do not show up in testing. The rate of antibody development could be even higher if such individuals are counted.

The MERS virus

By Kim Yang-joong, medical correspondent

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]